Voices of the Future @ WILD at Manchester Museums.
Voices of the Future – Collaborating with children and young people to re-imagine treescapes
Background to the project:
Harm to our treescapes (and its negative impacts on animal and plant life & environmental quality) will deeply affect young people. Planning future treescapes with children and young people is vital. Maintaining these spaces requires awareness, understanding, collaboration and action. Treescapes: Voices of the Future is a research project that aims to integrate children’s and young people’s knowledge, experiences and hopes with scientific knowledge to co-produce new approaches to creating and caring for resilient treescapes that benefit the environment and society. The project is led by Manchester Metropolitan University and is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)[NE/V021370/1]
Our exhibition
What will the treescapes of the future be like? This immersive exhibition shares insights from a three-year collaboration with diverse children and young people from across and beyond Greater Manchester. Together we explored how we can create and care for treescapes that welcome and nurture diverse forms of life. Inspired by children and young people’s ideas, we invite visitors to help us imagine future treescapes that are hopeful, equitable and resilient. This exhibition consists of the following key exhibits:
The Tree of Hope
Drawing on research with primary school children and young people from asylum-seeking backgrounds, this section of the exhibition introduces the idea of the ‘Tree of Hope’. This idea emerges simultaneously from a children’s book by Kehkashan Basu, the ‘Odaa Tree’ in traditional Oromo culture, and a youth participatory action research project (within Voices of the Future).
Using the peg board, this display will centre on a two-dimensional representation of a tree, spreading across the board, with the title ‘Tree of Hope’.
Developing a Manifesto for Wild Treescapes Futures
This story presents a manifesto poem developed by 90 primary school children at Seymour Park Community Primary School. It includes a printed board presenting the manifesto, alongside information and images capturing its creation and provocations to encourage audience reflection and action.
This story is about the ways in which urban trees contribute to the environment.
Urban Trees pictured in new ways
Drawing on recent laser-scans of urban trees including in Whitworth Park and Alexandra Park, this part of the exhibition explores the science of carbon capture and the ways in which trees can provide a hopeful future in the form of their potential to sequester carbon and release oxygen.
The story will be told in still panels as well as in film and information guides.
What do children and young people think
we should do in the future?
We have a film that has been put together with pupils from a number of schools in Greater Manchester. This film shows children designing treescapes, planting trees, measuring trees and caring for trees and also describes messages that children have for adults. It is both a call to action and an immersive experience.
The exhibition is on from the 2nd September to the 2nd December at Manchester Museums in their Wild Futures: Partner Space.
About ‘Voices of the Future’-
The project is delivered by Manchester Metropolitan University with Aberdeen, Cumbria, Birmingham, Middlesex, Plymouth, Sheffield, and Sheffield Hallam Universities.
Our project partners include Manchester City of Trees and The Mersey Forest and we are increasingly working with DEFRA and the Chartered College of Teachers to realise our vision to re-shape educational practice with a focus on children’s relationships to treescapes.
We have planted over 1000 trees in schools in Greater Manchester aided by our partner Manchester City of Trees. We have surveyed youth activism in the UK.
Our Tree of Hope research group, composed of refugee-background young people have informed DEFRA about the need for land to plant trees.
Our scientists have worked with children and young people to measure below-ground tree roots to assess the carbon capture of trees.
PARTNERS
National: Natural England, The Chartered College of Teaching, Early Childhood Outdoors,
Regional: Manchester City of Trees, The Mersey Forest.
Schools: Woodside Primary School, Aberdeen; Seymour Park Community Primary School, Blackrod Primary School, Stretford Grammar School, all in Greater Manchester, Cowley International School, St Helens, Lindow Primary School, Wilmslow.
