677931

editorial2016
CIE0010.1177/1463949116677931Contemporary Issues in Early ChildhoodEditorial

Editorial

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood

Childhoods and time: Rethinking

2016, Vol. 17(4) 359366
The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:
notions of temporality in early sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1463949116677931
childhood education cie.sagepub.com

Childhoods and time

Childhoods are temporal encounters that are vibrant, changing, shifting and, in some discourses,
even disappearing. Childhood is a temporal encounter an encounter with an idea that speaks to
the experience of time. In early childhood education, this encounter has been progressively con-
structed and compartmentalized from ideas of childhood to the seven-year childhood stretch, and
now to the in-between childhood phases. With new constructions of childhoods come new ethical
and pedagogical relationships. At the same time, new childhoods are constructed as timeless
childhood is a natural state both forgotten and then remembered.
Notions of time and temporality can be seen to draw from multiple theoretical threads. One
thread, noted in Bloch (2013), engages with new historicism, or cultural history (Popkewitz et al.,
2001) and relates to the post-structural theories of language, truth, power, governmentality and
technologies of the self (Foucault, 1980, 1991). Another thread traces Deleuze and Guattaris
(1987) notion of the rhizome that focuses on contingency, non-linearity, rhizomatic, unpredictable
and uncertain movement, and a micropolitics of political action (Dahlberg et al., 2007; Rose,
1999). The articles in this special issue specifically focus and work with notions of time and tem-
porality, drawing from diverse post-structural framings as opposed to a more modernist history that
suggests causality, progress and linear time, from past to present an evolutionary historical notion
of time. These diverse perspectives focus on Foucaults argument that:

The traditional devices for constructing a comprehensive view of history and for retracing the past as a
patient and continuous development must be systematically dismantled Necessarily, we must dismiss
those tendencies that encourage the consoling play of recognitions. Knowledge, even under the banner of
history, does not depend on rediscovery and it emphatically excludes the rediscovery of ourselves.
History becomes effective to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being as it divides
our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself. Effective history
deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it does not permit itself to be transported
by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending. It will uproot its traditional foundations and
relentlessly disrupt its pretended continuity. This is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it
is made for cutting. (Foucault, 1971/1984, quoted in Bloch, 2013: 66)

Grappling with notions of time is especially pertinent for educational and early childhood schol-
arship and pedagogy that examine and act within concepts of past and present childhoods, as well
as the futures of childhoods within economic/cultural and local/global entanglements. The collec-
tion of articles in this special issue addresses philosophical ideas and practical issues at the inter-
sections of childhoods. While diverse and different, a binding concept throughout this issue is the
play with temporality the idea that time is relational. Each of the articles explores ways in which
time may be renegotiated and reconceptualized not only as an enabling or constraining concept,
360 Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 17(4)

but also as one of many productive forces that shape childhoods. Time has, then, also the qualities
of an aporia.
An aporia, following Derrida (2000), speaks to the problem of inquiring into the nature and
experience of time. An aporia is the non-road, the barred, the non-passage (Derrida, 2000: 5),
meaning that we cannot ever arrive at an understanding of time. Time appears as ever present and
ever passing, and yet the apparent laws of time require that we cannot escape from time in order to
observe these very qualities. This non-road that is the inquiry of time is an aporia entirely because
it is a non-road upon which an inquiry is already being undertaken the inquirers passage may
be barred, may be impossible, but it is nevertheless a way to go; an enduring question (Gregoriou,
2003: 258; original emphasis).
This inquiry into the aporia of time has an educational and pedagogical thrust. It explores tem-
poral contexts and devices through which childhoods are regarded as more or less educational and/
or pedagogical. This special issue is, then, a device of sorts, arguing for the asking of questions
concerning time. How, for instance, does the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Johann Heinrich
Pestalozzi or Jean Piaget endure in constructions of an early years curriculum? What experience of
time appears as real, as taken for granted, through their machinations of learning, teaching and
thinking? And heading deeper into the question, how do their conceptions of the minutiae of edu-
cational progress become childhood?
Acknowledging the difficult nature of engaging with the scholarship of time (the range and
trickiness of the subject) has become a palpable challenge a challenge that the journal editors
strongly encouraged us to engage with. As this special issue attests, the aporia of time is a chal-
lenge not to be ignored, but to be wrestled with, and we hope that the articles inspire further debate,
scholarship and reflection on practice. The articles engage with a range of timely topics (if you will
excuse the pun): identity and narrative, schooling and curriculum, ontologies and epistemologies,
policy and practice, and learning and development, through rethinking the past, present and future
in relation to early childhood.

Childhood temporalities
Although space and place have been researched extensively in education and relevant disciplines in
recent decades (e.g. see Aitken, 2001; Christensen and OBrien, 2003; Duhn, 2012; Holloway and
Valentine, 2000; Moss, 2010; Prout, 2003), limited attention has been paid to the connectedness of
time and temporality with these concepts. Notable exceptions include Wien (1996) and Wien and
Kirby-Smith (1998), who discuss the tyranny of time, and Pacini-Ketchabaws (2012) material-
discursive account of acting with clocks.
The temporal dimensions of childhood dictate multiple, and often contradictory, philosophical
and practical enactments. For example, in current future-focused educational discourses, time has
become a commodity, a defining factor in the way adults perceive and seek to impact childrens
being and becoming. Time is perceived as structured and measurable, as a duration and as an
occasion during which an action, process or condition exists and continues, or is extinguished.
Time is a series of linear instances, the flow of which can be (re)routed through human intervention
and to predetermined outcomes.
A neo-liberal epidermis of the early years permeates thinking about time in early childhood
policy and practice. The accepted plasticity of the young childs brain leads economists to be con-
cerned for this ticking bomb get the brain in the right state at the right time. No matter how
diverse, plural or technicoloured it seems to think about the child in a market, her education is
narrowly timed to her present and future economic productivity and profitability. At the same time,
childhood is constructed as being at the mercy of a rapidly changing or disappearing temporality.
Editorial 361

Childhood time is not something orderly and controllable, stretched from any fixed point into the
future, but something that is being lost, mismanaged, manipulated and endangered by encroaching
global and market forces.
Grounded in and compelled by such contradictory notions of time, teacher educators and early
years professionals have employed many different methodologies and philosophies aimed at ben-
efitting children and their childhoods. This professionalization of the early years as a time of
education has gradually, and in very diverse ways, shaped all involved in their work with and for
the child, family and community. Childrens being and becoming, habits of mind, relationships
with the world, and preferred and also not-so-preferred models of behaviour are entrenched as
values that early years educators, researchers and teachers accept, recognize and respect to vary-
ing degrees. Ironically, the application of philosophies and methodologies, despite their best
intentions, has sometimes missed its mark and left the child behind, and has subjected children to
measurements, treatments and pedagogical experiments. Yet these philosophies and methodolo-
gies are often justified as being right on time. There is, then, an enduring task to question the ways
in which times and temporalities of early childhood are understood, and to engage with a growing
interest in understanding the philosophies and methodologies that shape and place childhood as
childhood (and adulthood as adulthood). These philosophies and methodologies demand more
and more clearly that they be heard and elevated in light of the contemporary political and policy
environment.

Childhoods and adulthoods

JM Barries (2004) Peter Pan reminds us of Neverland, where childhood can stop time. The
articles in this special issue argue for various concepts related to the notions of gender, perfor-
mance and desire involved here: the normal boy desires to continue to have an autonomous place
to play far away from adults and perhaps never to have to grow up to be individually responsible
for his (dependent) wife and family. For Wendy, Barrie implies that she has to grow up: she must
take care of her brothers; she will be a mother; Peter has a choice to refuse developing into an adult
but Wendy does not. Peter can choose abnormality in this case, staying in childhood, not devel-
oping over time or within a notion of time and linear, temporal, conceptual discourses; Peter can
choose childhood autonomous play where he is still a leader and a leading child/man, who
defies Captain Hook (the adult) as well as his family, his defined normal and planned-out future.
This future, of course, for Barrie, takes place at a particular time and situated place in England in
the early 20th century and within a particular class, where the possibility of childhood is some-
thing of a space of leisure, idealized adventure, and play for and with boys of a certain class. The
future of autonomous, civilized, responsible male leadership of family and society appears dull
and difficult to Barrie, who, we must all admit, loves children and childhood. Barrie does not want
to grow up, although he has had to perform being grown-up; he lives imaginatively and literally in
the lives of young children; he will not let his performance of being a British upper-class male ruin
his imagination or his actions of love with and for children. Barries books spark the imagination
of what it might be like to live in a more innocent world than Barrie actually lived in, to remain a
child, to stop the ticking clock of the crocodile tick-tock, tick-tock.
In this special issue, there are many ways to question child development as embedded in a gen-
dered/aged/classed/raced/cultural set of discourses where the performance of adulthood is cri-
tiqued and a desire for staying still (also time-bound) becomes an event that is cherished,
desired, abnormal and never to be had, except in our imaginations. But is this true? Childhood is a
culturally and historically contingent space that embodies, encloses and lets loose different possi-
bilities in its performance. Childhoods are constructed as discursive spaces in our imagination
362 Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 17(4)

against the normal process of leaving childhood. At the same time, in so many of our countries,
childhoods are both diverse and situated, and also still located in young and older peoples imagi-
nations and actions. We adults have not left our play, but have returned from our adult, mature,
responsible maternal or paternal roles to engage in more play again. Our leisure/play time, how-
ever, was curtailed and will be again if we let it. Our ability to act childishly, navely, innocently,
cruelly and badly towards ourselves and more so towards others has not been stopped by our
adulthood, or by Captain Hook. We are still able to find spaces for subversive activity and belief;
we can still play in the sandbox, although for many these moments seem reduced, as they now are
for many of our children, by institutions of family structures, early schooling and linear progres-
sion from space and place across years (or time). The event rather than development is important;
the event of imagined childhoods as these are performed in moments of our lives is contrasted with
normal immature (read this as uncivilized like Peter was imagined) as well as normal mature
behaviour. How do we perform childhood in our daily lives? Our imagination, as Barries imagi-
nation and desiring body, is constrained but not contained. Tick-tock, tick-tock does not mean we
are all clocked.

Linear and sequential time

Descartes separated out and privileged the rational from the emotional in development (as well
as the objective from the subjective), the notion of linear time and development was born as part
of the Cartesian (Descartian) contributions to both philosophy and, ultimately, to views of child-
hood/adulthood, women (emotional) and men (logical/rational), and the hierarchies of what
modernity ended up suggesting was more or less important in different individuals develop-
ment. Rousseau (2003) provided a further rationalisation of the linearity of development through
his attention to the childs growth towards reason, and the conditions required to produce the
mature, adult, mind. Rousseau (2003) amplified the discriminatory nature of this pathway, char-
acterising the development of Sophie as acceptably emotional, dependent and nurturing, with
less emphasis on the necessity of logical and rational educational outcomes when compared to
Emiles journey to citizenship.
The notion of linear, sequential development, with separable types of stages for cognitive, emo-
tional, language, social and physical development, stems from these foundations and from others,
as we can see by looking at the history of western early childhood and child developmental science.
Earlier stages of development were, indeed, implicated in Platos philosophies, as well as in
primitive and indigenous cultural societies where children were, and often still are, thought to
have new capabilities around the ages of five to seven (Whiting and Edwards, 1988). The notion of
primitive childhoods and developing/slower-developing nations also embodies the notion of mov-
ing from less mature, more innocent, more primitive towards more mature, less primitive (although
this is questionable with all of our current policies e.g. emphasizing military/industrial and cor-
poratized states, privileging wars, guns, deaths, etc.). While time units encourage measurement and
the quantification of time, and perhaps linear movement and a conception of progress over time,
they also mask the cultural and spatial construction of beings. Distended and disordered time
allows us to question the Descartian logic and modern philosophy that rests on the notion of linear
development as well as progress.

Moving with/in/through contradiction

Practitioners and scholars are often given exemplars to watch, read and embed in their practice. But
rarely are they asked to experiment with these exemplars to engage with the terrible powers of
Editorial 363

deviation and digression (Massumi, 2002: 18) harboured within every example. Moving with/in/
through these contradictory exemplars of childhood requires experimentation. A motivation for
this special issue is to encourage experimentation with diverse philosophical perspectives on child-
hood and time by rethinking and reconceptualizing scholarship in early childhood education in
relation to what temporality is and means, and how it is performed in childhood and in early years
settings.
Through thinking and doing differently with time, alternative relations appear mundane,
unheard, unspoken childhoods become extraordinarily powerful. The grand narratives that
bind the field of early childhood to particular conceptions of time fall apart. These philosophi-
cal and methodological moves provide us with infinite potential recombinations of our world.
Reimagining and readjusting temporalities, the authors move with/in/through these contradic-
tory spaces.
Andrew Gibbons article, the first in this special issue, unpacks the common refrain that we
live in rapidly changing times, a widespread but largely unexamined belief that informs and
legitimates new relationships between childhood and technology. These new relationships involve
a matrix of new media, new pedagogy and new subject knowledge, informed by digital-age dis-
courses that underscore the notion of rapid change and the claim that teachers need to get with
the times. In exploring the temporal politics of childhood and technology, Gibbons advises cau-
tion about the unquestioning acceptance of any assumed consensus about rapid change, particu-
larly in its relation to advances in technology. The article explores the impact and the limitations
of the use of time in relation to digital-age education, the history of the problem of rapidly chang-
ing times, and what the author sees as the somewhat absurd future of rapidly changing times. The
critique is grounded in the politics of difference, arguing that studying and teaching about child-
hood and technology will be more fruitful in terms of educational subjectivities that resist an idea
of the inevitability of rapid change and technological intervention as the guiding framework for
our educational future. The result is a set of political tools for questioning the way that the idea of
time is used.
The second article, by Iris Duhn, questions prevailing assumptions about childhood as a
marker of linear, logical, and exploitable time, allowing for time imaginings that are unusual
and yet familiar to the way time is practised in early childhood education. At the centre of her
article is Momo, the little girl time-child of Michal Endes 1973 fairytale about a childhood of
the past and future. The tale is an imaginative vignette that illustrates fears and dreams about
ways of life in urban industrial society a strong platform from which to tackle the time-based
logic of global neoliberalism. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, Duhn engages with
time as rhythmical and material, to introduce the concept of Momo-time a provocation that
intimately connects Duhn with the teachers task of speculating and narrating her own unique
time practice. Momo-time reduces reliance on linear causality, stimulating images of joy and
playfulness, and generating opportunities for imaginative ways of being. Duhn argues that
imagining otherwise requires an ability to think outside or alongside economic and scientific
imaginations. Momos greatest fear is that no one has any time left not only a matter of death,
but more importantly a matter of how life is lived. Momo has an abundance of time, embodying
the idea of human life without fear of the future and without attachment to the past as a source
of present and future successes and failures.
Introducing a perspective indigenous to Aotearoa New Zealand, Lesley Rameka explores a
whakatauk (proverb) that speaks to Mori perspectives of time, in which past, present and future
are intertwined, and time has no restrictions it is both past and present, according to the proverb:
Kia whakatmuri te haere whakamua (I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my
past). Life is seen as a continuous cosmic process, to which the past is central as it shapes both
364 Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 17(4)

present and future identity. From this perspective, ancestors are ever present, existing in both the
spiritual and physical realm alongside and within the living. Ancestry is an important cultural influ-
ence on the way Mori conduct their lives, and life is seen as a transitory process moving from
body to body and generation to generation. Ramekas exploration of Mori perspectives on time
provides inspiration and guidance in reconceptualizing possibilities for the provision of early
childhood education.
From within the discourse of philosophy of time, temporality, space and childhood, Marek
Tesar provides a new reading of childhood and child development, challenging the binaries between
childhood and adulthood, space and time, as embedded in early childhood as a temporal event. In
his reading of Peter Pan, Tesar utilizes diverse philosophies of space and time to rethink childhoods
emerging in the ruins of modernity, as he examines the plasticity of time in the architecture of
childhood. In Tesars reading, time and temporality are redefined through mundane engagements,
a denial of development, in order to elevate an event of childhood, as the perennial childhoods
deny the possibility of historical development, and subjective realities become imbued with
vibrancy and plasticity. Problematizing time as a legitimate measure for childhood, the author
foregrounds epistemological, ontological, ethical and political notions to rethink how childhoods
are conceptualized and dissected, distinguished and timed.
The next article, by Sandy Farquhar, engages with time and memory as different ways to con-
sider the curriculum in early childhood, and offers three different orderings of time to generate
three very different understandings of early childhood identity. The first chronological or devel-
opmental time involves sequential progress through life (an idea familiar and fundamental to
many early childhood programmes); the second disordered time speaks of a child as a continu-
ous, often random reassemblage; and the third distended time introduces a fluidity to the past,
present and future. Portraying childhood and the curriculum in light of these multiple and varied
understandings of time, Farquhar invites more inclusive formulations of education than those
which currently prevail, and establishes the preconditions for an expanded sense of subjectivity for
participants in the educational relationship. The curriculum, she argues, acts as a blueprint for cul-
tural adaptation, through which we learn what it means to be human, both limiting and promoting
particular possibilities for identity formation. This play with time is a call for radical openness and
unpredictability.
Becoming is the theme of Casey Myers article, contributing to an emerging post-human con-
versation in early childhood and interrupting taken-for-granted notions of time and temporality.
Myers reports on a year-long ethnographic study in a US kindergarten. Using extracts from chil-
drens dialogue and adult commentary, she interrogates how adult notions of time limit and con-
struct childrens play through such notions as age-inappropriate behaviour and by discouraging
forms of play that adults may see as purposeless, disorderly or frivolous. As an alternative, she
offers the mangle as a dance in which boundaries are blurred to the extent that the various ele-
ments lose their clear boundaries. As a metaphor, the mangle offers an escape from the confines of
temporal normativity, resisting the limiting effects of developmental analyses and providing a
more nuanced version of childhood becoming(s) in the material-discursive flow of the classroom.
The theme of emergence within the complexity of the mangle supports an open, playful engage-
ment with childrens play, enabling those who work, play and research with young children to
accommodate the often messy and interrelated nature of minds, bodies, materials and space.
The final article, by Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Kathleen Kummen, acknowledges the
work of environmental humanities scholars who argue that humans have fundamentally altered the
planet through short-sighted human-centric actions, and that such a predicament presents a trans-
formative opportunity to no longer maintain colonialist separations between humans and the rest
of the world. As pedagogues and researchers, the authors argue that the challenges posed by
Editorial 365

routines (enacted through industrialized clock-driven practices) in early childhood education

offer similar potentially transformative moments in our work with young children. In this article,
they address how a new epoch of human-driven planetary change might be a call to reimagine
temporality in early childhood education, challenging the clocking practices that structure both the
arrangement of children and educators in early childhood classrooms and the very practices
deployed throughout a regular day. In the reimagined reality, the authors explore response-abilities
for a more liveable future.
We complete this special issue with a colloquium, (Re)defining good teaching: Teacher per-
formance assessments and critical race theory in early childhood teacher education, by Sara
Michael Luna. This article poses the question: How have the newly mandated teacher perfor-
mance assessment certification requirements (edTPA) affected linguistically and ethnically diverse
early childhood pre-service teachers in an urban school of education?
This issue also includes two book reviews: Peter Mosss Transformative Change and Real
Utopias in Early Childhood Education: A Story of Democracy, Experimentation and Potentiality
(2014), reviewed by Guy Roberts-Holmes, and Melinda Vandenbeld Giless edited Mothering in
the Age of Neoliberalism (2014), reviewed by Melissa Sherfinski.

Marek Tesar
The University of Auckland, New Zealand
Sandy Farquhar
The University of Auckland, New Zealand
Andrew Gibbons
Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
Casey Y Myers
Kent State University, USA
Marianne N Bloch
University of WisconsinMadison, USA

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