CFP Teaching Time

Time & Society Special forum section: Call for submissions

Teaching Time
Edited by Michelle Bastian and Keri Facer

The study of time has always had to deal with the fact that it has no easy disciplinary home. Each discipline may have its own take – with the sociology, anthropology and philosophy of time all being well-established. But what has often characterised an interest in time is the relentless pull to inter- and multi-disciplinary ways of working. Much has been written about the theories and methods appropriate to this wide-ranging field, not least in the pages of Time & Society which has championed integrative approaches in particular. To our knowledge, however, very little has been made available about the specific pedagogies that time scholars have developed for university students and new scholars beginning their studies in this complex and definition-defying area of research. How do we go about teaching time?

A careful search of the literature reveals strong research interest in temporality as a core element of educational practice. There is the extensive work which unpacks the traditional temporalities of education itself (eg Franch and De Souza 2015; Duncheon and Tierney 2013, Hohti 2016), as well as the time pressures of teaching and how they affect pedagogy (eg Gravesen and Ringskou 2017). Here we see time in its disciplinary mode within education (cf Alhadeff-Jones 2017). At the same time, we are beginning to see the use of critical theories of time for challenging and redesigning dominant educational temporalities. Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman (2019), for example, turn to work on counterfuturism and queer temporalities to rethink outcomes-based models of teaching in primary and secondary education. Queer temporalities research has been drawn on for theorising a ‘pedagogy of vulnerability’ (Shelton and Melchoir 2019). Crip time has been used as a framework for redesigning college composition classes in the US (Wood 2017), as has Afrofuturism (Grue 2019). Theories of anticipation have been used to reflect on ways that models of the future are passed on in problematic ways (Amsler and Facer 2017a).

Indigenous and decolonial scholarship is also inviting critical attention to temporality as part of pedagogic practice in universities and schools. This includes the re-introduction of deep time practices of learning in and with place from Dharug communities in Australia, to the adoption of intergenerational story-telling pedagogies in Sami Communities (Lopez Lopez & Coello, 2021; Jensen, 2020). Work here also includes the inter-species pedagogies of the Common-Worlds research collective (Pacini-Ketchabaw and Kummen 2016), as well as strategies from indigenous and futures studies for connecting learning with place cross the ‘long now’ (Wooltorton et al, 2020).

Even so, there are fewer guides for understanding how theories and methods of time studies might be taught – in other words, for understanding the pedagogies that can build understanding of the sorts of theoretical developments, methodologies and canonical texts that have emerged over the 30 years since Time & Society was founded. How are the next generation of scholars in this field being trained and developed? There are contributions such as Jacqueline Ellis and Jason D. Martinek’s (2018) article on teaching Afrofuturism and examples of research on teaching futures studies, eg Berg 2018, including special issues devoted to the topic (Amsler and Facer 2017b). And yet, while there are undoubtedly many cross-overs between studies of anticipation and futures, our interest in this CFP is in addressing the key gap in published literature on the question of teaching time studies and critical time studies (Huebener 2015).

As a result, we are inviting contributions to an ongoing forum section on Teaching Time throughout our 30th anniversary year. We are inviting both well-known and emerging scholars to share their reflections on the delivery methods, strategies, course design and assessment methods that they have employed to explore time with their students, including how time is conceptualised in this pedagogical work. We would love to hear about all related issues, for example, the innovative assignments that have worked well and might be adopted by others; how a time studies ‘canon’ is created, challenged and transformed; approaches for introducing a field to students who may never have thought about time since they were taught to read a clock in early childhood (Birth 2017: x-xi); or how students been enabled to provincialize their own temporal understandings and put them into dialogue with others. What hasn’t worked, or what risks have been uncovered in your teaching approaches? What methods have been used to collect evidence that these methods are working as hoped? Also welcome are reflections on institutional issues such as where these courses best sit, how students are attracted and what support might be developed for wider education in time studies. Finally, we also invite work that troubles the framing we have set up here and pushes us to think otherwise.

Put more succinctly questions these forum contributions may address include:
• How are scholars supporting the training and development of postgraduate students in time studies?
• What is the nature of the canon that is being created to teach time studies and what are its limitations and potential areas for future development?
• What forms of pedagogic practice are being developed to nurture temporal reflexivity?
• How is the teaching of time studies being mediated – what tools, materials and resources are being used?

Submissions will be accepted on a rolling basis for publication in our 2022 issues (last submission by 1 August 2022) and will be reviewed by Michelle Bastian and Keri Facer. Suggested word limits are around 2000-4000 words and we recommend that those interested in submitting contact us first (
michelle.bastian [at] ed.ac.uk or Keri.Facer [at] bristol.ac.uk ) with a short query to see if the topic is a good fit for the section.

Bibliography

• Alhadeff-Jones M (2017) Time and the Rhythms of Emancipatory Education : Rethinking the temporal complexity of self and society, Taylor & Francis.
• Amsler S & Facer K (2017a) Contesting anticipatory regimes in education: exploring alternative educational orientations to the future. Futures, 94, 6-14.
• Amsler S & Facer K eds (2017b) Learning the future otherwise: emerging approaches to critical anticipation in education. Futures, 94, https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/futures/vol/94/suppl/C
• Berg S (2018) Pedagogical Possibilities: Arts-Based Practices of Collaborative Time for Teaching the Future. Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, 28(1), 6-18. doi:10.5325/trajincschped.28.1.0006
• Birth K (2017) Time Blind: problems in perceiving other temporalities. New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
• Duncheon J C, & Tierney W G (2013) Changing Conceptions of Time: Implications for Educational Research and Practice. Review of Educational Research, 83(2), 236–272. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654313478492
• Ellis J, Martinek J, & Donaldson S (2018) Understanding the Past, Imagining the Future: Teaching Speculative Fiction and Afrofuturism. Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy28(1), 111-122. doi:10.5325/trajincschped.28.1.0111
• Franch, M., & Souza, J. P. D. (2015) Clocks, calendars and cell phones: An ethnography on time in a high school. Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology, 12, 417-450. https://doi.org/10.1590/1809-43412015v12n2p417
• Gravesen, DG, Ringskou, L (2007) On the move from pedagogy to timeagogy? Or how time constitutes the work of pedagogues in the Danish Primary School and Leisure-time Center, IJREE, 5:2, 164-177. https://doi.org/10.3224/ijree.v5i2.04
  
• Grue MNP (2020) An Afrofuturistic Vehicle for Literacy Instruction, Journal of College Reading and Learning, 50:1, 33-44, DOI: 10.1080/10790195.2019.1693937
  
• Hohti R (2016) Time, things, teacher, pupil: engaging with what matters, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29:9, 1148-1160, DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2016.1201610
  
• Huebener P (2015) Timing Canada: The shifting politics of time in Canadian Literary Culture. Montreal and Kingston: McGill University Press.
  
• Jensen EM (2020) Conceptualizing Oktavuohta as a Storytelling Methodology Sámi Research 4, 25.
  
• Lopez Lopez, L and Coello, G (2021) Indigenous Futures and Learnings taking place, London: Routledge, ISBN: 9780367894603
  
• Pacini-Ketchabaw V and Kummen K (2016) ‘Shifting temporal frames in children’s common worlds in the Anthropocene’, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 17(4), pp. 431–441. doi: 10.1177/1463949116677930.
  
• Shelton SA & Melchior S (2020). Queer Temporalities, Spacetimematterings, and a Pedagogy of Vulnerability in Qualitative Inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 26(1), 51–59. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800419868507
  
• Springgay S and S E Truman (2019) Counterfuturisms and speculative temporalities: walking research-creation in school International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 32:6, 547-559, DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2019.1597210
  
• Wood T (2017) Cripping Time in the College Composition Classroom. College Composition and Communication, 69(2), 260-286. Retrieved August 19, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/44783615
  
• Wooltorton S, White P, Palmer M, & Collard L (2020) Learning Cycles: Enriching Ways of Knowing Place. Australian journal of environmental education 37(1), 1-18. doi:10.1017/aee.2020.15