Abstract
Childhoods and time
Childhoods are temporal encounters that are vibrant, changing, shifting and, in some discourses, even disappearing. Childhood is a temporal encounter – an encounter with an idea that speaks to the experience of time. In early childhood education, this encounter has been progressively constructed and compartmentalized – from ideas of childhood to the seven-year childhood stretch, and now to the in-between childhood phases. With new constructions of childhoods come new ethical and pedagogical relationships. At the same time, new childhoods are constructed as timeless – childhood is a natural state both forgotten and then remembered.
Notions of time and temporality can be seen to draw from multiple theoretical threads. One thread, noted in Bloch (2013), engages with new historicism, or cultural history (Popkewitz et al., 2001) and relates to the post-structural theories of language, truth, power, governmentality and technologies of the self (Foucault, 1980, 1991). Another thread traces Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of the rhizome that focuses on contingency, non-linearity, rhizomatic, unpredictable and uncertain movement, and a micropolitics of political action (Dahlberg et al., 2007; Rose, 1999). The articles in this special issue specifically focus and work with notions of time and temporality, drawing from diverse post-structural framings as opposed to a more modernist history that suggests causality, progress and linear time, from past to present – an evolutionary historical notion of time. These diverse perspectives focus on Foucault’s argument that: The traditional devices for constructing a comprehensive view of history and for retracing the past as a patient and continuous development must be systematically dismantled … Necessarily, we must dismiss those tendencies that encourage the consoling play of recognitions. Knowledge, even under the banner of history, does not depend on ‘rediscovery’ and it emphatically excludes ‘the rediscovery of ourselves.’ History becomes ‘effective’ to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself. ‘Effective’ history deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it does not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending. It will uproot its traditional foundations and relentlessly disrupt its pretended continuity. This is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. (Foucault, 1971/1984, quoted in Bloch, 2013: 66)
Grappling with notions of time is especially pertinent for educational and early childhood scholarship and pedagogy that examine and act within concepts of past and present childhoods, as well as the futures of childhoods within economic/cultural and local/global entanglements. The collection of articles in this special issue addresses philosophical ideas and practical issues at the intersections of childhoods. While diverse and different, a binding concept throughout this issue is the play with temporality – the idea that time is relational. Each of the articles explores ways in which ‘time’ may be renegotiated and reconceptualized not only as an enabling or constraining concept, but also as one of many productive forces that shape childhoods. Time has, then, also the qualities of an aporia.
An aporia, following Derrida (2000), speaks to the problem of inquiring into the nature and experience of time. An aporia is the ‘non-road, the barred, the non-passage’ (Derrida, 2000: 5), meaning that we cannot ever arrive at an understanding of time. Time appears as ever present and ever passing, and yet the apparent laws of time require that we cannot escape from time in order to observe these very qualities. This ‘non-road’ that is the inquiry of time is an aporia entirely because it is a ‘non-road’ upon which an inquiry is already being undertaken – the inquirer’s passage may be barred, may be impossible, but it is nevertheless ‘a way to go; an enduring question’ (Gregoriou, 2003: 258; original emphasis).
This inquiry into the aporia of time has an educational and pedagogical thrust. It explores temporal contexts and devices through which childhoods are regarded as more or less educational and/or pedagogical. This special issue is, then, a device of sorts, arguing for the asking of questions concerning time. How, for instance, does the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi or Jean Piaget endure in constructions of an early years curriculum? What experience of time appears as real, as taken for granted, through their machinations of learning, teaching and thinking? And heading deeper into the question, how do their conceptions of the minutiae of educational progress become childhood?
Acknowledging the difficult nature of engaging with the scholarship of time (the range and trickiness of the subject) has become a palpable challenge – a challenge that the journal editors strongly encouraged us to engage with. As this special issue attests, the aporia of time is a challenge not to be ignored, but to be wrestled with, and we hope that the articles inspire further debate, scholarship and reflection on practice. The articles engage with a range of timely topics (if you will excuse the pun): identity and narrative, schooling and curriculum, ontologies and epistemologies, policy and practice, and learning and development, through rethinking the past, present and future in relation to early childhood.
Childhood temporalities
Although space and place have been researched extensively in education and relevant disciplines in recent decades (e.g. see Aitken, 2001; Christensen and O’Brien, 2003; Duhn, 2012; Holloway and Valentine, 2000; Moss, 2010; Prout, 2003), limited attention has been paid to the connectedness of time and temporality with these concepts. Notable exceptions include Wien (1996) and Wien and Kirby-Smith (1998), who discuss the tyranny of time, and Pacini-Ketchabaw’s (2012) material-discursive account of acting with clocks.
The temporal dimensions of childhood dictate multiple, and often contradictory, philosophical and practical enactments. For example, in current future-focused educational discourses, time has become a commodity, a defining factor in the way adults perceive and seek to impact children’s being and becoming. Time is perceived as structured and measurable, as a ‘duration’ and as an ‘occasion’ during which an action, process or condition exists and continues, or is extinguished. Time is a series of linear instances, the flow of which can be (re)routed through human intervention and to predetermined outcomes.
A neo-liberal epidermis of the early years permeates thinking about time in early childhood policy and practice. The accepted plasticity of the young child’s brain leads economists to be concerned for this ticking bomb – get the brain in the right state at the right time. No matter how diverse, plural or technicoloured it seems to think about the child in a market, her education is narrowly timed to her present and future economic productivity and profitability. At the same time, childhood is constructed as being at the mercy of a rapidly changing or disappearing temporality. Childhood time is not something orderly and controllable, stretched from any fixed point into the future, but something that is being lost, mismanaged, manipulated and endangered by encroaching global and market forces.
Grounded in and compelled by such contradictory notions of time, teacher educators and early years professionals have employed many different methodologies and philosophies aimed at benefitting children and their childhoods. This professionalization of the early years as a time of education has gradually, and in very diverse ways, shaped all involved in their work with and for the child, family and community. Children’s being and becoming, habits of mind, relationships with the world, and preferred and also not-so-preferred models of behaviour are entrenched as values that early years educators, researchers and teachers accept, recognize and respect to varying degrees. Ironically, the application of philosophies and methodologies, despite their best intentions, has sometimes missed its mark and left the child behind, and has subjected children to measurements, treatments and pedagogical experiments. Yet these philosophies and methodologies are often justified as being right on time. There is, then, an enduring task to question the ways in which times and temporalities of early childhood are understood, and to engage with a growing interest in understanding the philosophies and methodologies that shape and place childhood as childhood (and adulthood as adulthood). These philosophies and methodologies demand more and more clearly that they be heard and elevated in light of the contemporary political and policy environment.
Childhoods and adulthoods
JM Barrie’s (2004) Peter Pan reminds us of ‘Neverland’, where childhood can stop time. The articles in this special issue argue for various concepts related to the notions of gender, performance and desire involved here: the normal boy desires to continue to have an autonomous place to play far away from adults – and perhaps never to have to grow up to be individually responsible for his (dependent) wife and family. For Wendy, Barrie implies that she has to grow up: she must take care of her brothers; she will be a mother; Peter has a choice to refuse developing into an adult but Wendy does not. Peter can choose abnormality – in this case, staying in ‘childhood’, not developing over time or within a notion of time and linear, temporal, conceptual discourses; Peter can choose ‘childhood’ – autonomous play where he is still a leader and a leading ‘child/man’, who defies Captain Hook (the adult) as well as his family, his defined normal and planned-out future. This future, of course, for Barrie, takes place at a particular time and situated place – in England in the early 20th century – and within a particular class, where the possibility of childhood is something of a space of leisure, idealized adventure, and play for and with boys of a certain class. The ‘future’ of autonomous, civilized, responsible male leadership of family and society appears dull and difficult to Barrie, who, we must all admit, loves children and childhood. Barrie does not want to grow up, although he has had to perform being grown-up; he lives imaginatively and literally in the lives of young children; he will not let his performance of being a British upper-class male ruin his imagination or his actions of love with and for children. Barrie’s books spark the imagination of what it might be like to live in a more innocent world than Barrie actually lived in, to remain a child, to stop the ticking clock of the crocodile … tick-tock, tick-tock.
In this special issue, there are many ways to question child development as embedded in a gendered/aged/classed/raced/cultural set of discourses where the performance of adulthood is critiqued and a desire for staying ‘still’ (also time-bound) becomes an ‘event’ that is cherished, desired, abnormal and never to be had, except in our imaginations. But is this true? Childhood is a culturally and historically contingent space that embodies, encloses and lets loose different possibilities in its performance. Childhoods are constructed as discursive spaces in our imagination against the normal process of leaving ‘childhood’. At the same time, in so many of our countries, ‘childhoods’ are both diverse and situated, and also still located in young and older people’s imaginations and actions. We adults have not left our play, but have returned from our adult, mature, responsible maternal or paternal roles to engage in more play again. Our leisure/play time, however, was curtailed and will be again – if we let it. Our ability to act childishly, naïvely, innocently, cruelly and badly towards ourselves and – more so – towards others has not been stopped by our ‘adulthood’, or by Captain Hook. We are still able to find spaces for subversive activity and belief; we can still play in the sandbox, although for many these moments seem reduced, as they now are for many of our children, by institutions of family structures, early schooling and linear progression from space and place across years (or time). The event rather than development is important; the event of imagined childhoods as these are performed in moments of our lives is contrasted with ‘normal’ immature (read this as uncivilized like Peter was imagined) as well as ‘normal’ mature behaviour. How do we perform ‘childhood’ in our daily lives? Our imagination, as Barrie’s imagination and desiring body, is constrained but not contained. Tick-tock, tick-tock does not mean we are all ‘clocked’.
Linear and sequential time
Descartes separated out and privileged the rational from the emotional in development (as well as the objective from the subjective), the notion of linear time and development was born as part of the Cartesian (Descartian) contributions to both philosophy and, ultimately, to views of childhood/adulthood, women (emotional) and men (logical/rational), and the hierarchies of what modernity ended up suggesting was more or less important in different individuals’ development. Rousseau (2003) provided a further rationalisation of the linearity of development through his attention to the child’s growth towards reason, and the conditions required to produce the mature, adult, mind. Rousseau (2003) amplified the discriminatory nature of this pathway, characterising the development of Sophie as acceptably emotional, dependent and nurturing, with less emphasis on the necessity of logical and rational educational outcomes when compared to Emile’s journey to citizenship.
The notion of linear, sequential development, with separable types of stages for cognitive, emotional, language, social and physical development, stems from these foundations and from others, as we can see by looking at the history of western early childhood and child developmental science. Earlier ‘stages’ of development were, indeed, implicated in Plato’s philosophies, as well as in ‘primitive’ and indigenous cultural societies where children were, and often still are, thought to have new capabilities around the ages of five to seven (Whiting and Edwards, 1988). The notion of primitive childhoods and developing/slower-developing nations also embodies the notion of moving from less mature, more innocent, more primitive towards more mature, less primitive (although this is questionable with all of our current policies – e.g. emphasizing military/industrial and corporatized states, privileging wars, guns, deaths, etc.). While time units encourage measurement and the quantification of time, and perhaps linear movement and a conception of progress over time, they also mask the cultural and spatial construction of beings. Distended and disordered time allows us to question the Descartian logic and modern philosophy that rests on the notion of linear development as well as progress.
Moving with/in/through contradiction
Practitioners and scholars are often given exemplars to watch, read and embed in their practice. But rarely are they asked to experiment with these exemplars – to engage with the ‘terrible powers of deviation and digression’ (Massumi, 2002: 18) harboured within every example. Moving with/in/through these contradictory exemplars of childhood requires experimentation. A motivation for this special issue is to encourage experimentation with diverse philosophical perspectives on childhood and time by rethinking and reconceptualizing scholarship in early childhood education in relation to what temporality is and means, and how it is performed in childhood and in early years settings.
Through thinking and doing differently with time, alternative relations appear – mundane, unheard, unspoken childhoods become extraordinarily powerful. The grand narratives that bind the field of early childhood to particular conceptions of time fall apart. These philosophical and methodological moves provide us with infinite potential recombinations of our world. Reimagining and readjusting temporalities, the authors move with/in/through these contradictory spaces.
Andrew Gibbons’ article, the first in this special issue, unpacks the common refrain that ‘we live in rapidly changing times’, a widespread but largely unexamined belief that informs and legitimates new relationships between childhood and technology. These new relationships involve a matrix of new media, new pedagogy and new subject knowledge, informed by digital-age discourses that underscore the notion of rapid change and the claim that teachers need to ‘get with the times’. In exploring the temporal politics of childhood and technology, Gibbons advises caution about the unquestioning acceptance of any assumed consensus about rapid change, particularly in its relation to advances in technology. The article explores the impact and the limitations of the use of time in relation to digital-age education, the history of the problem of rapidly changing times, and what the author sees as the somewhat absurd future of rapidly changing times. The critique is grounded in the politics of difference, arguing that studying and teaching about childhood and technology will be more fruitful in terms of educational subjectivities that resist an idea of the inevitability of rapid change and technological intervention as the guiding framework for our educational future. The result is a set of political tools for questioning the way that the idea of time is used.
The second article, by Iris Duhn, questions prevailing assumptions about childhood as a marker of linear, logical, and exploitable time, allowing for time imaginings that are unusual and yet familiar to the way time is practised in early childhood education. At the centre of her article is Momo, the little girl time-child of Michal Ende’s 1973 fairytale about a childhood of the past and future. The tale is an imaginative vignette that illustrates fears and dreams about ways of life in urban industrial society – a strong platform from which to tackle the time-based logic of global neoliberalism. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, Duhn engages with time as rhythmical and material, to introduce the concept of ‘Momo-time’ – a provocation that intimately connects Duhn with the teacher’s task of speculating and narrating her own unique time practice. Momo-time reduces reliance on linear causality, stimulating images of joy and playfulness, and generating opportunities for imaginative ways of being. Duhn argues that imagining ‘otherwise’ requires an ability to think outside or alongside economic and scientific imaginations. Momo’s greatest fear is that no one has any time left – not only a matter of death, but more importantly a matter of how life is lived. Momo has an abundance of time, embodying the idea of human life without fear of the future and without attachment to the past as a source of present and future successes and failures.
Introducing a perspective indigenous to Aotearoa New Zealand, Lesley Rameka explores a whakataukī (‘proverb’) that speaks to Māori perspectives of time, in which past, present and future are intertwined, and time has no restrictions – it is both past and present, according to the proverb: Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua (‘I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past’). Life is seen as a continuous cosmic process, to which the past is central as it shapes both present and future identity. From this perspective, ancestors are ever present, existing in both the spiritual and physical realm alongside and within the living. Ancestry is an important cultural influence on the way Māori conduct their lives, and life is seen as a transitory process moving from body to body and generation to generation. Rameka’s exploration of Māori perspectives on time provides inspiration and guidance in reconceptualizing possibilities for the provision of early childhood education.
From within the discourse of philosophy of time, temporality, space and childhood, Marek Tesar provides a new reading of childhood and child development, challenging the binaries between childhood and adulthood, space and time, as embedded in early childhood as a temporal event. In his reading of Peter Pan, Tesar utilizes diverse philosophies of space and time to rethink childhoods emerging in the ruins of modernity, as he examines the plasticity of time in the architecture of childhood. In Tesar’s reading, time and temporality are redefined through mundane engagements, a denial of development, in order to elevate ‘an event’ of childhood, as the perennial childhoods deny the possibility of historical development, and subjective realities become imbued with vibrancy and plasticity. Problematizing time as a legitimate measure for childhood, the author foregrounds epistemological, ontological, ethical and political notions to rethink how childhoods are conceptualized and dissected, distinguished and ‘timed’.
The next article, by Sandy Farquhar, engages with time and memory as different ways to consider the curriculum in early childhood, and offers three different orderings of time to generate three very different understandings of early childhood identity. The first – chronological or developmental time – involves sequential progress through life (an idea familiar and fundamental to many early childhood programmes); the second – disordered time – speaks of a child as a continuous, often random reassemblage; and the third – distended time – introduces a fluidity to the past, present and future. Portraying childhood and the curriculum in light of these multiple and varied understandings of time, Farquhar invites more inclusive formulations of education than those which currently prevail, and establishes the preconditions for an expanded sense of subjectivity for participants in the educational relationship. The curriculum, she argues, acts as a blueprint for cultural adaptation, through which we learn what it means to be human, both limiting and promoting particular possibilities for identity formation. This play with time is a call for radical openness and unpredictability.
Becoming is the theme of Casey Myers’ article, contributing to an emerging post-human conversation in early childhood and interrupting taken-for-granted notions of time and temporality. Myers reports on a year-long ethnographic study in a US kindergarten. Using extracts from children’s dialogue and adult commentary, she interrogates how adult notions of time limit and construct children’s play through such notions as age-inappropriate behaviour and by discouraging forms of play that adults may see as purposeless, disorderly or frivolous. As an alternative, she offers ‘the mangle’ as a dance in which boundaries are blurred to the extent that the various elements lose their clear boundaries. As a metaphor, the mangle offers an escape from the confines of temporal normativity, resisting the limiting effects of developmental analyses and providing a more nuanced version of childhood becoming(s) in the material-discursive flow of the classroom. The theme of emergence within the complexity of the mangle supports an open, playful engagement with children’s play, enabling those who work, play and research with young children to accommodate the often messy and interrelated nature of minds, bodies, materials and space.
The final article, by Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Kathleen Kummen, acknowledges the work of environmental humanities scholars who argue that humans have fundamentally altered the planet through short-sighted human-centric actions, and that such a predicament presents a transformative opportunity to no longer maintain colonialist separations between humans and the rest of the world. As pedagogues and researchers, the authors argue that the challenges posed by ‘routines’ (enacted through industrialized clock-driven practices) in early childhood education offer similar potentially transformative moments in our work with young children. In this article, they address how a new epoch of human-driven planetary change might be a call to reimagine temporality in early childhood education, challenging the clocking practices that structure both the arrangement of children and educators in early childhood classrooms and the very practices deployed throughout a regular day. In the reimagined reality, the authors explore response-abilities for a more liveable future.
We complete this special issue with a colloquium, ‘(Re)defining “good teaching”: Teacher performance assessments and critical race theory in early childhood teacher education’, by Sara Michael Luna. This article poses the question: ‘How have the newly mandated teacher performance assessment certification requirements (edTPA) affected linguistically and ethnically diverse early childhood pre-service teachers in an urban school of education?’
This issue also includes two book reviews: Peter Moss’s Transformative Change and Real Utopias in Early Childhood Education: A Story of Democracy, Experimentation and Potentiality (2014), reviewed by Guy Roberts-Holmes, and Melinda Vandenbeld Giles’s edited Mothering in the Age of Neoliberalism (2014), reviewed by Melissa Sherfinski.