High school commuters. Sustainability education on students’ mobility behaviours and perceptions of their everyday landscape

Abstract

Geographic education has the ability to easily connect everyday practices and experiences to global issues and trends, linking students’ everyday life with science and society and more generally allowing students toappreciate the complexity of life. Landscape and mobility provide key concepts to help students understand the relationships between society and ecosystems, especially as these notions directly relate to everydayexperience. The main goal of this article is to describe the results of an experiment on sustainable mobility in which high school students were asked to make a change in their commuting behaviours: walking orcycling instead of using other means of transportation. The data collected through an online survey and the production of mental maps enabled the researcher and the students to reflect on their commuting behavioursand the perceptions of the everyday landscape in relation to mobility. This article explains the methodology and the data collected and offers some considerations on the sample analysed and on the theoreticalunderpinnings of the experiment.