This sub-WP will explore how treescapes shape and enable bilingual families with young children to reimagine language in expansive and creative ways. The focus will be on the opportunities treescapes offer, and on how treescapes might underpin early childhood curriculum and support wellbeing, development and communication for young children. This work means a move away from spoken language in favour of embodied, and place-situated forms of knowing and experiencing treescapes together.
Methods:
The team will work intergenerationally with families with children aged under 3 years, and who have a home language that is not English, to ‘follow’ diverse treescapes in Northern England, exploring through ethnographic, embodied and creative means how language and belonging can be reimagined in conversation with trees. Parents will be invited to work as co-researchers alongside the tree-twining team to collect video snapshots or make brief fieldnotes as part of the research and to share and reflect back on the data from previous treescape visits, in order to identify what is collectively learnt about language, place and trees.