Re/conceptualizing time in higher education

There is a pervasive sense of incessant acceleration in the academic world. This book puts the temporal ordering of academic life under the microscope, and showcases the means of yielding a better understanding of how time and temporality act both as instruments of power and vulnerability within the academic space.

2025

The development of education is closely intertwined with time; the dynamic changes in time not only drive the innovation of educational concepts but also profoundly influence teaching practices and policy formulation. As a component of teaching and research, time thus possesses its own vitality. Time is at the heart of this book, offering a fresh look at how it shapes educational thought and practice. Drawing on insights from learners, educators, and researchers, the authors explore how time and rhythm play out in everything from classroom instruction and curriculum design to arts education, vocational training, lifelong learning, and policy-making. They remind us that time is not just about clocks and schedules; it deeply influences the way we grow, learn, and interact within educational settings. Although time can feel abstract-lacking a physical form-it is woven into the everyday realities of schools and institutions. This includes the rhythms of teaching, the structure of lessons, and the broader cultural, economic, and political factors that affect when and how students learn. Far from being a mere administrative concern, time underscores our cycles of development, impacts the goals we set for education, and shapes the social environments in which learning takes place. By combining careful observation, thoughtful reflection, and robust research, the authors shine a light on an often-overlooked dimension of education. They show how time profoundly affects cognitive growth, teaching strategies, institutional organization, and even the timing and length of assessments. Their work urges us to think more critically about the role time plays in shaping educational outcomes and invites readers to take a closer look at how this silent force influences both individual learning journeys and the broader framework of education as a whole. This book includes multiple authors' contributions, which seek to answer the question of how time-related constraints affect educational contexts and environments within formal or informal systems. First, the authors draw attention to the distinction that should be made between the three types of rhythms: biological, psychological, and social, and how these rhythms restrict an individual's capacity to perceive, feel, take action, and think about transformations within certain settings. Through these explorations, the book opens new perspectives for examining the diverse impacts of "temporal constraints" on education, such as the understanding of temporality concerning "sustainability" and the "Anthropocene" prompted by environmental issues, as well as reflections on the temporality of a "post-human" future world.

2020

Assistant Professor, Department of Educational Research & Assessment, University of Okara, Okara Pakistan, [email protected] Assistant Professor, Department of Teacher Education, University of Okara, Okara Pakistan, [email protected] Assistant Professor, Dean, Faculty of Education, Forman Christian College (A Chartered University), Lahore Pakistan, [email protected] ARTICLE DETAILS ABSTRACT History Revised format: August 2020 Available Online: September 2020 Doctoral students’ experiences of stay and study abroad determine how they experience and understand time in relation to other existential themes of body, space, and relation. The present study aimed to understand what meanings doctoral students’ assign to time while doing their doctoral studies in different public universities of Austria. Thirteen participants were recruited purposively to understand how did they experience time and how did their experience of time determine the way they live and study in a univer...

Time & Society, 2018

Time is often taken-for-granted as abstract and constant, even though the lives we lead are always changing within the context of time and because of time. In this paper, we explore the hidden challenges of hegemonic neoliberal framings of 'flexibility' which urge students to presume that study-time is asynchronous and can be engaged with anytime, eroding recognition that it is contextual and much more structured than expected. Timing is dynamic and shifts in relation to broader economic, spatial and cultural changes, all of which shape the 'temporal dis/positions' we discuss. A study that included 27 interviews with Australian university students is drawn on to illuminate these points. We argue that through the neo-liberalised projection of the university, important contextual dynamics and associated demands are increasingly disguised. This impacts on learning and teaching time and individualises responsibility for time management onto students, many of whom consequently experience guilt and self-blame.

Review of Educational Research, 2013

The construct of time influences student learning in and out of school and consequently pervades educational discourse. Yet the integration of information and communication technologies into contemporary society is changing how people perceive and experience time. Traditional theoretical and methodological approaches to time research no longer capture the nuances of digital, temporal realities. This article offers a theoretical analysis of three temporal perspectives: (a) clock time, measured in objective, linear units; (b) socially constructed time, experienced subjectively according to social and cultural context; and (c) virtual time, a new category that synthesizes emergent temporal theory in the digital age. Implications for educational research and practice are discussed. The authors initiate discourse around new theoretical approaches to educational time research in an era characterized by great sociocultural and temporal transformations.

Teacher Education Quarterly, 2005

Philosophy of Education 2016, 2018

This article traces the conceptualization of temporality through the trinity of Huebner, Heidegger, and Augustine. Accordingly, one way to understand the “gap between past and future” is to conceive of authentic learning within the existential-phenomenological tradition by discerning a temporal understanding of life that advocates for our ontological potentialities and possibilities as human beings.

Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2020

Over the past twenty years, university administrators in North America, Europe and elsewhere have used the apparent ‘crisis’ in higher education as an opportunity to roll out neoliberal policies. For many working in the academy, the effect has been felt as a very real crisis of time, as budgets, resources and job positions are cut, and the working day is stretched to the limit. Resistance has often taken the form of struggles over wages and job security, and, by extension, over time measured in terms of the length and intensity of the working day. While such struggles are necessary, our contention is that they are not enough. Extending the distinction between kairos and chronos as developed in the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, and Cesare Casarino, we wager that transforming higher education must involve more than “making more time” for our work; it must also “change” time. Only by so doing, we argue, can we realize — and expand upon — the university’s potential to interrupt the empty, homogenous time of capital and cultivate non-capitalist alternatives in the here-and-now. This paper thus makes three moves: one which critiques and analyzes the practices by which the university harnesses the creative time of living labor, making it both useful and safe for capital; a second which develops a ‘revolutionary’ theory of time that enables us to see capital not as the generative source of innovation, but instead as parasitic upon it; and a third, affirmative, move that explores experiments within and beyond the university with self-valorizing practices of collective learning, no longer as resource for state and capital, but as part of the ‘expansionary’ time of the common.