Attending to children’s voices within environmental education

Abstract

The article reports on a study that explores children’s epistemologies of the environment. We drew on Nxumalo’s (2016) concept of ‘refiguring presences’ as a conceptual and methodological orientation. Such an orientation develops an expansive understanding of voice, encourages researchers to resist absences and erasures, and braids together activities of attending, remembering, disrupting, and imagining. Based on a study in a diverse multilingual primary school in the North West of England, we explore children’s relationships with the natural environment with a focus on treescapes. We use an anti-colonial lens and propose a mode of listening to voices in ways that recognise the emergence and entanglements of data, distributed stories, knowledge systems and concepts in ways that challenge neat theorisations about children’s relationship with the environment.