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This thesis explores the role that curriculum-based environmental education plays in influencing young people's wellbeing. It adopts a social constructivist approach to understand how young people's wellbeing is understood, articulated, and experienced in residential learning environments. The thesis argues that positivistic and adult-centred accounts of wellbeing have restricted our appreciation of the diverse ways in which young people engage with and recognise their emotions in educational settings. In adopting an alternative framework, the thesis argues for experiential and subjective understandings of wellbeing to be developed through a range of methodological tools. The research sought to develop these ideas by focusing on the experiences of students visiting the Field Studies Centre at Slapton Ley (Devon, UK) and utilised focus groups and solicited participant diaries, providing a basis for phenomenological inquiry that enabled a direct engagement with young people participating in environmental education programmes. The empirical research focused on the experiences of young people between the ages of 14 and 18 years on a residential, curriculum-based environmental education programme and examined the role and potential of environmental education for supporting the wellbeing of young people. From an initial thematic analysis of the data, five elements were identified as key to the participants' wellbeing: wellbeing as multidimensional, social elements, psychological elements, physical health and environmental elements. These elements were then used to provide a framing for understanding young people's experiences of wellbeing throughout the lived experience of curriculum-based environmental education and, as a result, the research yielded three themes that provide an understanding of the key experiences of environmental education and its connection to wellbeing: experiences of place, experiences of people, and the learning experience. Using these themes and the participants' conceptualisations of wellbeing, the research then explored how strategies can be developed within environmental education to promote the wellbeing of young people and reveals the importance of fostering feelings of restoration, increasing social bonds and developing a sense of achievement and accomplishment. Consequently, this research contributes to the fields of environmental education and health and wellbeing research within a geographical context through demonstrating the importance of qualitative approaches in revealing the ways young people articulate their emotions in educational settings. Alongside this, it challenges assumptions about the way nature is utilised in wellbeing interventions, highlighting the role that social and cultural backgrounds can play in the way nature is experienced by different groups and how this can be addressed within environmental education. Therefore, a key contribution of this research is in providing an empirical analysis for the relationship between environmental education and wellbeing, and how to best design environmental education programmes that meet the needs of young people.

This thesis examines the ways in which outdoor environmental education can be understood in the context of relational-environmental encounters. The study focuses on residential learning programmes with secondary school students in the UK. The research aims to explore the extent to which current educational practices, structures and pedagogies in two case study locations can be said to occur as continuous lived experiences; invoking relational ontologies. Furthermore, this research examines the environmental encounters of students and considers how these encounters shape and challenge environmental narratives consisting social and cultural norms. Making use of developments within behaviour change theory, ecological ethics and environmental pedagogy, this thesis brings together ways of understanding environmental and sustainability education, notions of relational ways of being, and models for transformative societal change. The research methodology makes use of ethnographic encounters in two case locations comprising residential education centers in South Devon, UK, chosen for their representation of instrumental and emancipatory pedagogies. Participating in fifteen outdoor environmental education programmes over ten months, participant observation, focus groups, interviews and photo elicitation were deployed. In-field and subsequent thematic analysis, using structured coding elicited four central themes: structure, choice, relationships and discomfort. These themes formed the core empirical analysis and enabled an exploration of relational practices occurring across the spectrum of contemporary environmental education. The research therefore provides a narrative of residential experiences in a subjective, emergent and reciprocal environment, whereby both lived and learning experiences provide space for instrumental and emancipatory learning. Consequently, contributions are made to geography and education in four key areas; firstly, the articulation of a pedagogy of discomfort deployed explicitly and implicitly within environmental education; secondly, an advancement of relational connotations of place-making within environmental education as being emergent of agency, structure and the setting itself; thirdly, through the ecotheraputic ‘performance’ of other-than-human material and ecological environments in education discourses; and finally, through an advancement of a blended approach to environmental education, understood from an ecological-ethical, as well as a behavioural-practice perspective.

The continued growth of aviation poses a major challenge to climate change mitigation. Many argue that absolute reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will not be possible without restricting demand and call for fundamental changes in travel patterns, particularly flying shorter distances. However, research shows that voluntary behaviour change in this area is unlikely: even those who express concern over aviation emissions are unwilling to sacrifice their travel plans for the sake of the environment. It has been argued, therefore, that researchers and policy makers should direct their attention to the collective nature of unsustainable air travel, rather than blaming individual passengers for their “choices”. This thesis provides an in-depth and socially situated understanding of long-haul flying within the gap year context, which is an increasingly popular activity for the British youth. Drawing on Giddens’s structuration theory and using data from a study, which employed a variety of qualitative research methods, this thesis first positions the gap year as a social practice, characterized by shared social meanings, norms and resources; second, it explores factors influencing its current long-haul character; and third, examines the role of agency in gap year participation and mobility decisions. The findings suggest that travel to (often several) long-haul destinations is a particularly desirable, appropriate and convenient way of “doing a gap year” and that opportunities for making more sustainable choices, whilst not completely absent, are constrained. Moreover, the rules and resources that form the terrain for action for prospective gap year takers are shaped by numerous networked agents. As such, this thesis joins the calls for redefining the problem of unsustainable mobility from that of individual “choice” to collective travel practices. Strong structuration is suggested as a particularly useful conceptual framework to study non-routine forms of travel, such as gap years. Policy implications are discussed, specifically potential interventions that could shift the gap year practice into a more sustainable trajectory, or substitute it for a less carbon-intensive equivalent.

In this thesis I advocate and evidence ESD through understanding and analysing the ecology of change in educational organisations, in particular Tertiary Education (TE), during the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UNDESD, 2005-2014). I draw on my portfolio of research that examined various aspects of the efforts to mainstream ESD during this decade. My publications, which are referred to in this thesis, are based on experience of my own practice as lecturer, educational development manager and advocate of ESD at local, national and global level. My research approach is broadly based on action research principles. I argue that, to fully understand this complex change process, it is necessary to appreciate the role of the underpinning, and often conflicting, values in TE and how they influence the adoption of ESD. I further discuss the influence of both ‘top-down’ approaches, that are expressed in policies and frameworks, and ‘bottom-up’ approaches that are instigated by communities and individuals with special interests. The influence of the learning environment itself is also examined. Lastly, I make the case that the employment of appropriate action research methodologies can help with gaining a better understanding of this process as well as play a part in the process itself.