Session Information
07 SES 14 C, Literary Research in Times of Crisis
Symposium
Contribution
The paper draws on a three-year project exploring children and young people’s embodied relationship to treescapes (that is, spaces where trees are). We draw on our experiences of using story crafting as a method (Karlsson, 2009) to attend to children’s narratives as sites, where the discursive, the social, and the material/physical intertwine. We particularly are interested in the embodied experiences of treescapes with children in and outside the school context in the North of England. Our focus here was on the ways in which a story could develop provocations and inquiries with the children that led to further thinking about storying in a world threatened by climate change. We apply “critical literacy” (Vasquez 2014) as a framework to provide children a space for engaging in critical discussions around the themes of hope, trees, and environmental change. We read a story to the children who then responded with small stories of hope and drawings. The story was called ‘The Tree of Hope’ which involved a child, Khadra, finding out how to re-plant her home space, which had been a desert. The children in the school were re-planting their playground and finding out why trees were important in the climate crisis. When we told the story new possibilities and stories of hope emerged (Ojala 2012). Through this, we trouble assumptions about who knows what and how in environmental education (Trott and Weinberg, 2020) challenging adult-designed naturalised curriculum practices. Linking literacies through the story created an emergent space of practice that offered a structure in which to work with hope as a method (Kraftl 2008).
References
Karlsson, L. 2009. To construct a bridge of sharing between child and adult culture with the Storycrafting method. In: Ruismäki H and Ruokonen I (eds) Arts Contact Points between Cultures. Department of Applied Sciences of Education. Research Report 312. Helsinki: University of Helsinki, pp. 117–128. Kraftl, P. 2008. Young People, Hope, and Childhood-Hope. Space and Culture, 11(2), 81–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331208315930 Ojala, M. 2012. “Hope and Climate Change: The Importance of Hope for Environmental Engagement among Young People.” Environmental Education Research, 18 (5), 625–642. doi:10.1080/13504622.2011.637157. Vasquez, V.M. 2014. Negotiating Critical Literacies with Young Children. Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group: New York. Trott, C. D., Weinberg, A. E. 2020. "Science Education for Sustainability: Strengthening Children’s Science Engagement through Climate Change Learning and Action", Sustainability, 12 (16), pp.1-24. Doi: https://doi.org/10.3390/su12166400
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