30. Environmental and Sustainability Education Research (ESER)
Research Workshop
Dwelling and Learning with Trees: Relational Methodologies for Researching with Children, Young People and Treescapes
Elizabeth Curtis1, Jo Vergunst1, Ed Schofield1, Grace Banks2, Samyia Ambreen3, Kate Pahl3
1University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom; 2Community Partner https://tracscotland.org/storytellers/grace-banks/; 3Manchester Metropolitan University
Presenting Author: Curtis, Elizabeth
Workshop
Abstract
What kind of educational research methodologies emerge from the development of an interdisciplinary project on the future of trees and treescapes in the UK?
This workshop draws on the organisers’ experiences of co-producing research with children and young people (CYP), their educators and curricula as part of a 3-year interdisciplinary UKRI project Voices of the Future: Collaborating with children and young people to re-imagine treescapes. The project is led by Prof Kate Pahl (Manchester Metropolitan University) and includes researchers from four other universities including the University of Aberdeen and community partners.
Our research includes working with children and young people from pre-school age to young refugees and asylum seekers and students. In this workshop our focus is on the methodologies which we draw on to frame our work and those which have emerged as we approach the midway point in our research with children, students and staff as they navigate dwelling and learning with trees.
We are interested in how learning through the context of trees opens up opportunities to work across aspects of the curriculum. How can children and young people see the purpose and value of environmental sustainability in everyday life and for the future and how can they actively contribute to it? We take a socio-cultural approach to the question of how children and young people see the values of UK treescapes. We are interested in how learning with trees creates different ways of recognising and working with diversity in relation to culture and class and the complexity of different local environments. This has involved disrupting concepts such as ‘native’ species when thinking about planting new trees and exploring existing woods and forests.
There is also recognition of an urgent need to systematically co-produce and evaluate with children and young people a policy for future urban treescapes, as well as to articulate the benefits of outdoor spaces for diverse young people’s health and well-being. Children and young people ‘currently have limited opportunities to cultivate, voice, and express their understandings, concerns, and imaginings about climate change within their local environments and communities’ (Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie 2019:192).
There have been few interdisciplinary, evaluative studies of children’s participation in, and construction of treescapes. Our project seeks to explore how to creatively integrate children and young people’s knowledge, experience, hopes and activism with scientific knowledge, environmental activism and educational and social policy. In the literature there has been a predominant focus on the multiple benefits of children’s engagements with ‘natures’ in light of evidence that children are spending less time outdoors, have fewer experiences of nature, and are, as a result, less healthy and less likely to hold the kinds of environmental knowledges held by past generations. There is also a correlation in many countries between tree canopy cover and income level (Sax, Manson and Nesbit 2020), with historically marginalized residents having less access to treescapes. Jannsson et al (2014), amongst others, argue for the need to research a much more long-term engagement by children and young people with treescapes, such as studies by Gurholt in Norway (2014) and that children’s attachment to, and friendship with place is developed by repeated use and expressions of creativity (Chatterjee 2005).
In this workshop we will explore both practical and philosophical methodologies which we are using to underpin our research. This will include working outside with trees and responding to reflective questions which have arisen from our work.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedMethodologies
The Voices of the Future project is an interdisciplinary project which brings together researchers from a wide range of academic disciplines including forestry, geography, anthropology, child and youth studies, philosophy and education. Through our work with children and young people in planting trees and exploring historic woodlands we have been developing an emergent woodland methodology.
Our overarching methodology is based on taking a co-production approach in which researchers work alongside participants to plan and carry out research together through everyday activities such as going to and being at school. The goal is not simply to transmit knowledge about trees from those who have it to those who do not, but for all involved to take part in ‘creating living knowledge’ as Facer and Enright put it (2016). Taking a co-productive approach has also supported a more nuanced understanding of working as an interdisciplinary team.
Practice plays an important role in the development of our research methodology. In methodological terms this involves participant observation/practice in which members of the research team work alongside teachers, environmental rangers, foresters, story tellers, tree scientists and landscape historians. Using observational drawing, telling stories, engaging with experts in relation to tree based ecologies and learning about landscape histories provide a basis for children and young people to develop their own views and stance on the role of trees in the present, the past and the future. Through direct experience of meeting people who work with trees widen their understanding of the kinds of jobs they might choose to pursue in later life.
In this research workshop, we will give participants the opportunity to contribute to our project by sharing some of these methods in an outdoor environment amongst trees (Kelvingrove Park), and gaining feedback from participants. We will open the session with an introduction to our project and the aims of this session. Using materials available to hand, we will explore some of the techniques we have used with different groups of school pupils and students in our engagements with them in woods. Collectively, we will reflect on the value of outdoor learning and the nature of curriculums that allow space for these kinds of indeterminate activities. In theoretical terms we will connect with the work of Tim Ingold on dwelling and the lifeworlds of trees, and Gert Biesta on the engagement of children and young people with the world through education.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsConclusions
Through tree based activities, this workshop will enable you to consider the possibility of going beyond schools as places of curricular subject learning in the narrow sense. Instead, we invite you to think about role of trees and the environment more generally, in the everyday being-in-the-world of children and young people, and their values and hopes for learning for sustainability.
Participation in the workshop will encourage you think about how your research can provide the time and space to acknowledge what unfolds, to notice entanglements of learners, environments, teachers and curriculum and surface the tensions between the intentions embedded in the curriculum and the everyday, attentive lives of children and their teachers
ReferencesReferences:
Chatterjee, S. (2005) Children's Friendship with Place: A Conceptual Inquiry. Children, Youth and Environments , Vol. 15, No. 1,Environmental Health, and Other Papers(2005), pp. 1-26.
Facer, K. and Enright, B. (2016). Creating Living Knowledge: The Connected Communities Programme, community university relationships and the participatory turn in the production of knowledge, Bristol: University of Bristol/AHRC Connected Communities.
Gurholt, K. P. (2014) Joy of nature, friluftsliv education and self: combining narrative and cultural-ecological approaches to environmental sustainability. Journal of adventure education and outdoor learning. [Online] 14 (3), 233–246.
Ingold, T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment. London: Routledge.
Jannsson, M., Gunnarsson, A., Mårtensson, F. and Andersson, S.,2014. Children's perspectives on vegetation establishment: Implications for school ground greening. Urban Forestry & UrbanGreening,13(1), pp.166-174.
Rousell. D., & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, A., (2020) A systematic review of climate change education: giving children and young people a ‘voice’ and a ‘hand’ in redressing climate change, Children's Geographies, 18:2, 191-208,
Sax D, Manson C and Nesbitt L (2020) Governing for Diversity: An Exploration of Practitioners ’Urban Forest Preferences and Implications for Equitable Governance. Front. Sustain. Cities 2:572572.
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