Paper short abstract:

This paper presents fieldwork on the use of historic and contemporary maps with young children as part of an exploration of their local landscape. We describe how children made connections between past and present and how this translated into encounters with the outdoor environment itself.

Paper long abstract:

Our research in the interdisciplinary project ‘Voices of the Future: Collaborating with children and young people to re-imagine treescapes’ explores children’s perspectives on the past, present and future in trees and woods. We carried out ethnographic fieldwork on the kinds of learning that children engage in when presented with the opportunity to move between the classroom and outdoors. While outdoor education has often focused on the benefits of simply being outdoors for learning, we developed processes of research and creative practice with children that spanned both settings. It allowed insight into the children’s sense of place and their senses of history and future possibility.

This paper focuses the use of historic and contemporary maps (accessed through technological means) to explore differences and continuities in local treescapes. Beginning in the classroom, the maps opened the possibility that the children’s landscape had changed significantly through recent decades. Moving outside, children tried to connect the maps to what they saw in their surroundings. This raised a series of questions for us in terms of learning from the children’s perspectives. Where the the kind of knowledge codified in maps is in many ways different to that experienced in the landscape, maps can create a sensitivity to time that changes how the landscape is felt. What possibilities are there for integrating children’s voices into decision-making about landscapes that they will, broadly speaking, be responsible for as they grow older? Can combinations of technological, historic and landscape-based learning be useful in this task?