Starting with trees: Between and beyond environmental education

Abstract

This paper explores learning about environments with a focus on starting with trees. The paper examines children and young people's perceptions of and engagement with trees, as part of a large grant that sought to examine the dis/benefits of trees for children's lives and learning. In this paper, we attempt to move beyond notions of ‘education for sustainability’ in that we start with knowledges generated with trees. We are concerned that current educational discourses tend to incorporate extractivist perspectives. They also focus on humans rather than the inseparability of the natural world from the human experience as a starting point for research. The paper is based on a large-scale, transdisciplinary, UK-based project, rooted in in-depth, co-produced research with a total of 545 children and young people, across multiple primary and secondary schools in England and Scotland. The paper begins and exemplifies a new conversation about what starting with trees might enable for studies of education and childhood. We propose the concepts of dwelling, skilling and belonging as a novel framework for ‘starting with trees’.