Making Reform Time: Temporal Imaginaries and the Cultural Politics of Education

• In Event: 26.081 - Poster Session 3
  In Poster Session: 26.081-1 - Division G Section 4: Policy and Praxis

Abstract

The paper uses a case study of a city-wide reform planning process to examine how city elites appropriate ideas and narratives from national policy circuits to articulate a “temporal imaginary” for the city’s schools; to show how that imaginary defines the meanings of schooling in terms of futures lying beyond it, reduces school quality to questions of relative speed, and defines student performance in terms of individuated temporal progression, and, finally, to show how the imaginary segregates students from different class and racial backgrounds by the kinds of futures they have, and the ways their school time counts. Issues of social justice and inequality in educational provision are displaced to the future.

Author

• Jan K. Nespor, The Ohio State University