Do "We" Really Live in Rapidly Changing Times? The Temporal Politics of Childhood and Technology

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

Abstract

This paper critiques the common refrain that ‘we’ live in 'rapidly changing times'. This expression is deconstructed on account of its widespread and, it is argued here, its uncritical use in the study of childhood and of education. For evidence of this condition and for exploration of its purpose and outcomes, the paper is particularly interested in the ways in which new relationships between childhood and technology are legitimated on account of the perceived rapidness of the changing of ‘our’ times.
Teachers and educational researchers are frequently reminded that the times of the present are rapid in their changing-ness and that, given such conditions, education requires a particular kind of approach that is sensitive to (see for instance Lankshear & Knobel, 2008; Loveless & Williamson, 2013) or mitigates against (see for instance Selwyn, 2014) the rapid change of time. In terms of the former, digital age discourses regularly advise on the critical reality of the rapidness of change and the essentialness, therefore, of taking up some kind of matrix of new media, new pedagogy, and new subject knowledge. The expectation that teachers get with the times is most evident in the proclivity to state that ‘we’ all live in this time, and hence to universalize this condition. In terms of the latter, teachers are given evidence of the nature of the childhood that requires protection from ‘new’ experiences of time and in particular the technological source of these experience (Taylor, 2013).
The analysis in this paper takes on three phases, beginning with evidence of the impact (and the limitations) of the use of the idea of time in relation to the child’s digital age education; then turning back the clock and exploring the history of the problem of rapidly changing times (for instance in Bruce, 1991; Linder, 1974; Heidegger, 1962, 197l; and Rousseau, 1957) before finally plotting the somewhat absurd future of rapid changing times. The appearance of ‘rapidly changing times’ in educational discourse is shown to be an often uncritically applied tool appearing in a text in order to draw the reader into an assumed agreement on the nature of any given problem – with the particular problem here being the problem of technology.
The paper explores a politics of difference on the grounds that studying and teaching childhood and technology will be more open to the ways in which their educational subjectivities are constructed around the politics of time – a politics regarded as critical to the future of education and educational studies (McCarty, et al., 2014). Rapid change in time legitimates all kinds of intervention into the curriculum and in particular into the subjectivity of the child and teacher. The point here is then to provide a set of political tools for questioning the way that the idea of time is used. A creative approach to such questioning is provided with a turn to the work of Albert Camus and in particular the character Tarrou’s experiments with time during ‘The Plague’ (1960).

Author

• Andrew Neil Gibbons, Auckland University of Technology