This workshop will address two research questions, namely: that of (1) what role time has played in changing conditions of schooling in Europe and beyond; and (2) how one can conceive of time as related to past, present and future, that is: with what conception of time one operates when one con/figures change in terms of conditions of schooling including those pertaining to the role of time (“role”, “time”, “past, present and future” being used in singular form only to enhance readability).

Following on from both the two-part ECER 2018 (Bolzano) panelTimespacematters of Education: Reimagining School and Time through Places, Materials and People (Past_Present_Future) and the NW17 e-/publication Looking Back Going Forward: School_Time in Flux and Flow in Europe and beyond (Liverpool 2018), the workshop will invite participants to consider time as an entrance-way into current debates relating both to schooling, or education more generally, and to educational research across and beyond Europe. In view of NW17’s 20^thanniversary, the workshop thus aims to continue the innovative, boundary-crossing and-shifting conversations of a historical and theoretical nature that have characterised the network from its inception. Indeed, NW17 has sought to address a range of silences identified then (Grosvenor, Lawn and Rousmaniere, 1999) and in the course of the two decades that have followed since, for instance pertaining to images, materialities of schooling, various educational scapes, and archives both physical and digital. 

One notable silence in educational research relates to time, which remains underexplored although, as noted at ECER 2018, across the human and social sciences the exclusion of time as a theoretical prism has long been observed (Lauer 1981; Fraser 1988). Renowned scholars working across such fields as comparative education and history of education (Cohen 2002; Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal 2003) have reignited the debate around time as a conceptual blind spot, while scholarship in school ethnography/archaeology (Varela 2001) has focused renewed attention on the historical role of time alongside space, language and communication in school culture (Compère and Rodríguez 1997; Viñao 2001). Recently, a number of esteemed scholars (McLeod 2017; McLeod, Seddon and Sobe 2018; Goodman 2018) have picked up the thread/s of time again, both as a historical and theoretical subject of inquiry, shedding light on uneven spacetimes of education and material, spatial, sensorial and temporal entanglements of social and political consequence. This research workshop wishes to further such on-going interdisciplinary debates.

The objectives of the workshop are twofold: (1) to provide an opportunity for education scholars from across disciplinary fields, whether emerging or more established, to reflect on education past, present and future, enabling them to better appreciate conditions of schooling in relation to time as bound up with space, material and people in the flux and flow that has shaped and is still shaping imagined communities in Europe and beyond; and (2) to invite education researchers thus equipped with a temporally-inflected lens to explore the very notions of time with which they operate. It may thus, for instance, focus on the speed of changes in the ways knowledge is shaped and transmitted; rapid obsolescence of curricula; changing teaching and learning processes; increased standardised testing and growing concern with tests, data and metrics; and new issues of staff and student health and wellbeing. Likewise, it may revisit secular Modern notions of singular, linear-progressive time (Popkewitz, 2012) as an empty (cf. Walter Benjamin) backdrop to horizons of comparison.

First, each participant group would receive a table summarising initial results of the research behind this public engagement scholarship on time and education as well as a different set of essays. Each team would report its findings (reflections, ideas for further research, critical feedback) back to the whole group. In order to facilitate discussion, all groups would be given a series of questions, which could (but need not) inspire their analysis, among which possibly the following: - Do the teaching and learning materials presented online and in the published booklet, help a broad audience get a sense of schooling and education in Europe and beyond in relation to time? - Do the materials offer windows of opportunity for comparative thinking about schooling with and through time, as alternatives to current quantitative assessments of education systems? If not, what other material needs to be included? - What does careful scrutiny of materials analysed in the Looking Back Going Forward essays reveal about (1) education and educational research in and beyond Europe; and (2) about emerged and emerging challenges in the field of education broadly understood? - What picture emerges from the materials and essays of the role of teachers and teaching in terms of use(s) of time? - How do the numbers, images and essays relate to your own work and may they help produce new avenues of research? - What aspects touched upon in the essays (or observed in relation to numbers/images used) deserve (more) attention in educational research? - What theories and methodologies underpin the analysis of the essays presented; do you find these adequate; if not, what other theories and methodologies would be required? - How could the reflection on the theme of time in education be extended to a non-specialist audience? - How important is awareness of the different concepts of temporality in the past to design a better use of time in the future. Groups would then be asked to add tags to the materials discussed (e.g., a key issue, topic, period or method) to find out (1) what analysis of these may offer in terms of surplus value for educational research in the broadest possible sense (2) what a temporally inflected lens (a look at things through experiences from “the” past as experiences belonging also to “the” present and future) may yield in terms of different perspectives for the analysis of current and emerging issues in education and educational research.

Among expected workshop outcomes are: deeper appreciation of present conditions of schooling as history today and tomorrow, that is: as entangled with past(s) and future(s); increased awareness of the roles time has played in education in Europe and beyond; more explicit self-reflection in terms of categories of time underpinning education research; further conversations able to continue to renew the history of education and other fields of educational research. While the NW17 Looking Back going Forward e-/publication has formally been completed, the intention is to keep expanding on the work conducted and to continue the conversation about school and time past_present_future.

Cohen, Robert (2002). “Moments of Time: A Comparative note”. History of Education, 31, 5, 413-424. Compère, Marie-Madeleine and Rodríguez, Herminio B. (1997). Histoire du temps scolaire en Europe: ouvrage collectif (Paris: Institut National de Recherche Pédagogique). Fraser, Julius T. (1988). Time: The Familiar Stranger (Washington DC: Tempus Books). Lauer, Robert H. (1981). Temporal Man: The Meaning and Uses of Social Time (New York: Praeger). Goodman, Joyce (2018). “Thinking with the Width and Thickness of Time”. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 8, 2: 231-244. Grosvenor, Ian, Lawn, Martin and Rousmaniere, Kate (1999). Silences and Images: The Social History of the Classroom (New York: Peter Lang). McLeod, Julie (2017). “Marking Time, Making Methods: Temporality and Untimely Dilemmas in the Sociology of Youth and Educational Change.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 38, 1: 13-25. McLeod, Julie, Sobe Noah W., and Seddon, Terri (Eds.)(2018). World Yearbook of Education 2018: Uneven Space-Times of Education: Historical Sociologies of Concepts, Methods and Practices (London: Routledge). Nóvoa, Antonio and Yariv-Mashal, Täli (2003). “Comparative Research in Education: A Mode of Governance or a Historical Journey?” Comparative Education 39, 4: 423-438. Popkewitz, Thomas S. (2012). Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform: Science, Education, and Making Society by Making the Child (London: Routledge). Thyssen, Geert and Pruneri, Fabio (2018). Looking Back Going Forward: School_Time in Flux and Flow in Europe and beyond (Liverpool: EERA, Network 17). Varela, Julia (2001). “Genealogy of Education: Some Models of Analysis.” In: Cultural History and Education: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Schooling, eds. Thomas S. Popkewitz, Barry Franklin and Miguel A. Pereyra (New York/London: Routledge), 107-124. Viñao, Antonio (2001). “History of Education and Cultural History: Possibilities, Problems, Questions.” In Cultural History and Education: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Schooling, eds. Thomas S. Popkewitz, Barry Franklin and Miguel A. Pereyra (New York/London: Routledge), 125-150.