Trees, texts, and place-based education: the pedagogic potential of literary geography

Cooper, David ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6143-3772 and Hanley, Christopher ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0470-1125 (2025) Trees, texts, and place-based education: the pedagogic potential of literary geography. In: The Routledge Handbook of Literary Geographies. Routledge Literature Handbooks . Routledge, London, pp. 405-416. ISBN 9780367564339 (hardback); 9781003097761 (ebook)

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Abstract

This chapter explores the pedagogic potential of literary geographies by critically reflecting on a programme of work with secondary schools and a further education college in Greater Manchester, UK, that has heightened young people's attentiveness to local trees. The opening section explains how this work forms part of a wider interdisciplinary project, 'Voices of the Future: Collaborating with Children and Young People to Re-Imagine Treescapes', and situates the research within the context of some key principles in place-based education. The chapter then considers some of the pedagogic affordances of literary geographical thought and practice by reflecting on the design and delivery of educational activities focusing on a particular species: the Manchester poplar. Crucially, the chapter also discusses some of the challenges encountered when using interdisciplinary literary geographical approaches within learning environments that are invariably shaped by the institutional entrenchment of individual disciplines. The chapter ends by arguing that the introduction of a new Natural History qualification in the UK offers hope for the development of genuinely interdisciplinary pedagogic approaches that braid geographical thought, literary critical practice, and creative writing to invite young people to pay attention to the local and the near-at-hand.