Haunted Teaching Time

• In Event: Affective Cunning: Curriculum With/in Relational Networks of Gender, Knowledge, and Violence

Abstract

Schooling orients towards the future, preparing and regulating students’ entry into what is to come, but it also vibrates with the ghostly residue of the past or “that which appears absent can indeed be a seething presence” (Gordon, 1997, p. 8; Zembylas, 2013; Newfield & Bozalek, 2019). Hauntings are the leftovers of the school days--what could not be metabolized in the affective assimilationist regimes of the normative. These hauntings are outside of governable time in that they linger and pounce untethered to the logic of the bell schedule, yet still work with and on the temporalities of teaching.

Teaching traffics in condensed time, resonating with rubrics, tests, and minute-by-minute scripts. The intensities of the teaching day are heightened in what Beck (2017) calls the “heavy hours”--compressed decision-making in a speeded-up time. The “psychic spill-over” (Beck, 2017, p. 629) of the heavy hours lingers, troubles, and shapeshifts in what I call the “after hours.” Although I specify the after hours as the time between classes ending and teachers arriving at home, this dimension of teaching is unruly and the temporal hauntings materialize on their own time. This unruly time cannot be contained within Western conceptualizations of linearity, but a feminist frame elucidates the ways that “the temporal is not, and cannot be, so tidy and monolithic a tale,” rather we must attend to space-time (Massey, 2004, p. 84). The after hours, as a form of space-time, also reside in the crosshairs of the recent past and the not-yet future as teachers plan for the next day with the residue still working on and through their bodies. It is a time-between or “a speculative middle” (Springgay, 2020, p. 151).

This paper utilizes data from a nine-month study of four secondary public school teachers that asked, how do hauntings materialize in teachers’ after hours? In constructing collages of their teaching days, participants omitted the times and emotions of the heavy hours–as if those experiences were almost inaccessible. However, their ghostly residue sometimes materialized in the after hours, when time was slowed down and more diffuse. In interviews, teachers shared that they left the school building quickly at the end of the day in an attempt to exit the heavy hours, but the compressed events of the heavy hours stuck to them; for one participant this manifested in bad sleep and irritated skin. This post-qualitative analysis (St. Pierre, 2019) suggests that while teaching remains tethered to clock-time, an investigation of the after hours facilitates a more multifaceted understanding of teaching time, grounded in the pushes and pulls of the materialities of schooling and their afterlives. This attunement to haunted temporalities of teaching attends to the ordinary violences of schooling with a hope toward the possibility of remedy and repair.

Author

• Maddie Neufeld, Teachers College, Columbia University