‘Voices of the Future’ – teaching on treescapes
Dr David Cooper & Professor Kate Pahl, Place Writing (Manchester Metropolitan University)
It’s widely recognised how important trees are, not only globally but locally too and particularly in cities. Trees help bring down summertime temperatures (How urban trees help combat the urban heat island effect | Trees for Cities [treesforcities.org]) and they reduce pollution.
Added to that, there’s lots of evidence of how good trees are for people (City trees can help reduce stress and depression – study | World Economic Forum [weforum.org] and How trees support our mental health – Trees for Streets [treesforstreets.org])
The Woodland Trust has put the whole case here: Benefits of Urban Trees: What They Do For Us – Woodland Trust [woodlandtrust.org.uk]
The ‘Voices of the Future’ [treescapes-voices.mmu.ac.uk] project was funded by AHRC, ESRC and NERC with a focus on an interdisciplinary understanding of children and young people’s relationship to treescapes.
The team developed a methodology which surfaced children and young people’s relationship to treescapes. By listening to and being attentive to children’s meaning making practices, a social poetics of treescapes engagement emerged, one that was alive with a dialogic and immanent sense of what tree/child relations could be.
The project team also worked with secondary school English teachers and further education college lecturers in Greater Manchester and Shropshire to explore how thinking about and with local treescapes might form part of innovative place-based curricula.
