Introduction: Teaching time

Abstract

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 interand multidisciplinary 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 search of the literature reveals strong research interest in temporality as a core element of educational practice. There is extensive work which unpacks the traditional temporalities of education itself (e.g. Duncheon and Tierney, 2013; Franch and De Souza, 2015; Hohti, 2016), as well as the time pressures of teaching and how they affect pedagogy (e.g. 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. Springgay and 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 Melchior, 2020). Crip time has been used as a framework for redesigning college composition classes in the US (Wood, 2017), as has Afrofuturism Special Issue: Teaching Time