Early Childhood: A Play With Time

• In Event: 14.032 - Childhood and Time: Rethinking Notions of Temporality in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

A particular conception of time: teleological, linear and sequential, is valorised in curriculum projects promoting understandings of early childhood education associated with development and standardised progress. Curriculum is pivotal to the way we learn what it means to be human, acting as a blueprint for cultural adaptation. It necessarily limits and promotes particular possibilities of identity formation, each involving intentional inclusions and forgettings. Castenell & Pinar (1993) suggest that curriculum should seek to understand how systems of reasoning and categories of inclusion selectively erase certain understandings of ourselves.
The paper engages with time and memory as different ways to consider curriculum: Two unrelated, irreducible and radical plays on time are set in motion to offset the standard account of developmental time: (1) time as disordered and random; and (2) time as an historical-future project. The first provides a stark contrast with the orderedness of curriculum as a machine designed to reduce and regulate. The writing machines of Swiss DADA artist Jean Tinguely are metaphorically deployed to suggest that randomness, disorder and anarchy offer another human time: a dynamic freedom of constant inconstancy, “a piece of pure existence forever changing” (Hultén in Andersson, 2001). The second play with time is another departure from the standard account, with the clock of the long now (longnow.org). The long now project, established in 1996 to foster long-term thinking and responsibility for next 10,000 years. Whether myth or reality, the point of the clock project, touted as the “the world’s slowest computer” is intended to get us thinking about future in an extended present (Chabon, 2006).
Three different orderings of time provide for three very different understandings of identities with unique possibilities for curriculum. The first, developmental time, speaks of a child that progresses in familiar and habitual sequence from birth to death – an idea fundamental to many early childhood programmes and needing little clarification or discussion here. The second, disordered time, speaks of a child as a continuous re-assemblage; and the third, distended time, introduces a fluidity to past, present and future. To speak of curriculum in light of these latter two plays with time invites more inclusive formations of what it is to be human, formations timely to consider in light of the conference theme Toward Justice: Culture, Language, and Heritage in Education Research and Praxis. It is these two radical departures from common conceptions of time, and the kind of curriculum they call for, that will be explored in this paper.

Author

• Sandy Farquhar, The University of Auckland