In this paper, we report on children’s lived experiences of being with trees in a school. The children in the school were re-planting their playground to find out why trees are important in the climate crisis as part of a large interdisciplinary project called ‘Voices of the Future’ (Ref # 416424) funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). The project aimed to explore children and young people’s embodied relationship to treescapes (that is, spaces where trees are) in urban and rural settings.

In this talk, we will share reflections from our research encounters with Year 3 /4 children (7 to 8 years old) in a rural primary school in the north of England. The school practices forest school in a small woodland area where children can freely experience direct contact with nature and trees (Malone, 2007). Proximate and regular access to the forest school creates space and possibilities for children’s bodily and sensational engagement with nature, trees, and the more-than-human.

Building on existing practice in the school, we worked with listening as an attending methodology to attend to children’s lived experiences, their multimodal and multisensory stories of being in and moving around trees in the school woodland area. We attend to various ways through which children express their opinions, experiences of being in the area, enabling us to view the school woodland as generating diverse possibilities for children to learn knowledge and skills whilst being in/with trees and woods. To understand the complex interplay between place and experience, we frame our work on “common worlds relations” to position human and more than human as active and affective participants within their encounters (Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2013). By attending to children’s encounters with the woodland as relational events, we offer new possibilities of looking at the interdependence of human and more than human as complicated, relational and entangled with the material world (Horton and Kraftl, 2006).

Our research began with our visits to the school with the purpose of getting to know the children, class teacher, school as a place (i.e., school and the school woodlands) with its materiality. We were keen to involve children as co-researchers (Pahl and Pool, 2021) respecting their status as active beings (Prout, 2005) having embodied and relational voices (Cooper, 2022).  Our research aimed to focus on a diverse conceptual understanding of children’s voices, as we recognised that children need to be involved in decision making about climate change literacy and learning programmes (Rousell and Cutter-Makenzie, 2020). Our research encounters with children in their school land, helped us to think critically about the role of a cognitive focused model (Trott and Weinberg, 2020) of knowing and learning about environment, critically interrogating “who should decide what children should learn about trees and their role in tackling climate crisis and how?”. Working with Horton and Kraftl (2006)’s conception of research as a way of inquiring into something new differently in experimental way, we do not intend to produce a coherent account on alternative ways of knowing about trees and environment. Our focus here is to consider how this research lens can enable us to learn and explore about trees, humans, and the more-than-human world in diversified ways.

During our visits, we engaged children in dialogues to talk about trees and activities they do with trees in outdoor places which may include their school woodlands, back gardens, parks, and streets. We also invited them to join us in learning walks to be with/in the place where they will plant their trees as part of designing “our own forest” activity. Children as part of these activities also did some drawings. As a way of diversifying our research lens, we considered children’s dialogues, oral stories, and drawings as embodied, shaped, and shared within social, cultural, material, and relational spheres. Questioning the dominancy of oral language (Pahl and Rowsell, 2011) and human meaning making (Maclure, 2013) in education, we explored how children relate themselves to other humans and more than human actors, whilst sharing stories and images of their engagement with trees, school forest and other outdoor places. We found that this more-than-human lens led to a diversifying of our understanding of the relationship between children and treescapes. Children as part of their time in the school woodland are engaged in various bodily and sensual activities, through which we see woodlands as becoming a source of knowledge and creating possibilities for children to develop their skills. We include coppicing as an example through which children use woods from trees being grown/growing in the school woodland. Children work with their peers to build things such as dens, cottages, and community kitchen. Children also use wood logs to create fence for the pond to protect frogs and to design a sitting place on the ground for conversations. We consider such skills and knowledge less likely to be gained inside the classroom within the concrete walls through didactic modes of learning only. Children in the school woodland area also worked in teams practically experiencing the skills of making mutual decisions, working in teams, communicating, and respecting one another.

Drawing on Dewey’s idea that genuine education comes through experience (1938), with the help of school teacher, we identified how participatory, co-created, relational, and embodied approaches to learning can help us to recognise relationality and diversity in human and more than human worlds. We noticed children considering coppicing as an element for their new forests which they will plant as part of the project. We learned about children’s oral and visual stories of children’s relations with squirrels and birds who live in the school forest, how and why children wish to see them in their new forest. These also involved stories of children’s encounter with trees, human and more than human world outside the school woodland area such as trees in houses of relatives and grandparents. Our narration of our research encounters offers possibilities to re-think how woodland methodologies in a school can offer different forms of learning. We propose to re-imagine and construct learning differently, to move away from dominant adult-led prescribed pedagogies prioritised in the mainstream education (Kraftl, 2015), which sometimes undermines children’s agency in knowledge creation and ignores children’s diverse relations with the outside human and more than human world. We also offer a re-thinking of the research with children in the school. As, we have not perceived our encounters with children as a way to explain what the children’s relations with treescapes look like using our own adult lens. Questioning the dominancy of adult-led research methodologies in research about children’s educational lives, we believe that children’s emerging stories created possibilities for us to understand how their relations with treescapes can be in a shared co-created research space.

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