Fractured stories and voices of the future; coproduced research with young children and trees

What does it mean to bring very young children into conversations about climate change? Voices of the Future was a 3-year, multi-site project based in the UK, aiming to investigate treescapes through participatory research with children and young people. This paper focuses on a strand of the project that explored playing and making in and with treescapes, with children aged under 5 years and their grownups. We interrogate what it looks like to do coproduced participatory research about sustainable futures with young children and some of the tensions and contradictions that this kind of work brings into sharper relief. In particular, we describe moments of ‘off-task-ness’, and the resultant ways in which trees and children came in-and-out of focus in the research, as important for surfacing what we have called ‘fractured stories’. Fractured stories enabled us to imagine otherwise and to ask different questions. As a result, we offer five working principles, shaped by and emerging from our research and the fractured stories it produced, which may act as guidance for both future scholarship and practice with young children and trees.