We tell the story of an interdisciplinary project involving children in caring for, planting, listening to and becoming kin to the trees in their school grounds. We explore how pedagogies of transformational learning, response-ability and reciprocity can be practised to enable and improve relations with non-human kin. In Moss Side, Manchester, 2023, eleven children from a primary school council joined an after-school club to learn about the trees in their school grounds. Working with MEEN’s Treemarkable project, they were introduced to climate science and the notion of the wood wide web. They learnt to identify the trees, map their presences, tend to them with mulching and pruning, hug them and plant more. Nested into this was a soundscape research project that involved pupils in soundscape and deep listening, putting microphones into trunks to listen to the trees, and meditating on becoming the trees. Rooted in education for sustainability we highlight how it is possible to work beside the current educational system to facilitate transformative learning methodologies. We track how practising response-able and reciprocal pedagogies in the school field helped to inspire empathic responses and reconfigure Indigenous knowledges. By breaking out of the four walls of the classroom the project helped to regenerate human connectivity with the land while the careful use of creative practices cultivated attentiveness and improved relations between the human and non-human kin of Moss Side.
Lock et al. (2025) studied this question.