This paper explores an argument for community-situated spaces of encounter – acting as thresholds – between community and academia, through which: learning can be enhanced; a greater sense of identity and efficacy can be fostered, and a defined agency can be enabled. This proposition prioritises a dialogic relationship in a shared ground of agency and discourse, whose potential is reinforced through a rediscovery of the local arising from the COVID pandemic. The rediscovery of the local has pushed civic-minded universities pre-existing interrogation of their community-based learning practice in the context of marginalised communities; a key challenge is how to foster a dialogic relationship with a community when academia is not really part of the community? a concurrent question considers the spatiality of such practice? Proposed here is a situating of the civic university directly within the community offering opportunity for everyday dialogue on and experience of local life. This proposal re-sites the university’s civic initiatives outside the academy in community-based campuses. Central to this campus would be the coming together of the community and academia to envision and action joined-up approaches to multivalent issues. This initiative would simultaneously afford an innovative education while enabling students and staff to contribute to the wider community; at the same time the community campus would serve as an active agent in bringing the community together and reshaping its future. The community campus would act as a dialogic threshold between academia and the community, a space grounded in its social nature, mutual embrace and exchange.

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.