Abstrakt
In recent years, research on the "sense of place" (SOP) concept has gained importance in both the international environmental and geographical literatures. The formation of a student's relationship to place is one key challenge of the educational process in today's globalized society.
Although the concept is part of the cross-cutting area of environmental education, its implementation in schools is widely insufficient. To some extent, this situation might be rooted in the lack of theoretical research on this topic in Czechia.
Thus, the main aim of this paper is to offer an overview of foreign research that deals with this concept in the context of education, discuss its conceptual definition, and present the results of the research that deals with children's SOP in Czechia and Slovakia. The respondents consist of upper-primary school pupils (n = 8,653).
Their responses to an open-ended questionnaire were evaluated via inductive content analysis. The findings suggest that pupils' relationships to specific places exist in the psychological, sociocultural, and biophysical dimensions and that it includes the cognitive, conative, and affective domains.
Furthermore, the results provide evidence that a pupil's SOP exists at different scales. The results of this research can contribute to improving the efficiency of implementing the SOP concept in the educational process.