This sub-WP will study young people’s learning and relationships with trees. It draws on over ten years of university-community collaborative landscape research at Bennachie in Aberdeenshire (12). Through landscape history and palaeoecology, the team will explore how schools and young people in rural and urban regeneration areas can ‘find and enact their curriculum’ within treescapes, and will spread awareness amongst CYP of the dynamic history of British woodlands.
Methods
Academic, partner, and youth co-researchers, will use methods in landscape research (archival and survey work, pollen analysis), social science (interviews, walking methods) and environmental education to collaborate with CYP on researching the heritage of woods and trees in north-east Scotland, and CYP’s experiences within them. CYP’s ecological learning will be developed and evaluated through the co-production of the Tree Twining carbon mitigation toolkit, (WP2: Weatherall, Owen, Carr), and the development of two new records of vegetation history for Bennachie. The latter will involve the collection of sediment cores from damp contexts (peats, lake muds and/or soils) situated within, or adjacent to, existing lowland woodlands in the area, with analysis of their microfossil content (pollen, spores, and microscopic charcoal). Chronologies for the cores will be provided using radiocarbon (14C) dating.