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School tourism as a means of exploiting local cultural capital and its importance in education and local development (Doctoral thesis)

Γκουρνέλης, Παύλος/ Gkournelis, Pavlos

Educational tourism refers to a wide range of participants, from young students to senior travelers, whose main or secondary travel motivation is education. For students the primary purpose is education, whereas adults are usually interested mainly in touring. School tourism, a subcategory of educational tourism, refers to every organized student transfer in groups or as an entire school unit (few-hour or all-day field trips, educational excursions with overnight stays), which is implemented according to school curricula and fulfil the required educational, pedagogical, entertaining and socializing purposes. Despite the fact that educational field trips are an essential part of school life and their importance is increasingly recognized internationally, there are very few research studies about school tourism. Especially in Greek bibliography such studies are very rare. This dissertation attempts to fill this gap in bibliography and its purpose is to utilize the information from primary school teachers’ interviews, parents’ statements of students within this age group, the author’s educational experience and the available research data and analyze how field trips and educational excursions contribute to students’ education, not only by facilitating and supporting the learning process, but by developing students’ personalities as well. The importance of experiential learning is highlighted and environmental and museum education are approached as innovative interventions, which introduce new forms of education, while promoting educational activities off-campus and leading to students’ interactive participation on field. Furthermore, this dissertation aims to examine how school tourism can be the means to utilize and accent the local culture, as the students that participate in such activities can be visitors-tourists at times and other times serve as "hosts”, contributing in all cases in promoting a specific location and its local growth.