A warming planet calls us daily to interrogate global, local and individual un/sustaining rhythms and COVID-19’s restrictions were no exception. In this paper, two emerging educational researchers draw on a period during the global pandemic in 2020 when being in touch virtually lead to a re/view of sustenance and the role of time. Between two families, in particular, the constructed concept of ‘clock time’ came into question when we, as mothers and homeschool leaders, were enquirying into the kinds of bodily rest Covid-19 would allow. A previous understanding of ‘my time’ was to be alone with work for one of us.  No longer an option, family and work time intertwined at home. With children home ‘schooling’ they wanted to thread into the conversation too. We endeavoured to examine through post-inquiry (St Pierre, 2019) - would this be unsustaining? Or was there my time in family time? As Donna Haraway encourages us to stay with the trouble (2016) and Karen Barad resounds a call for time to be shaken to its core (2017), both illuminate global ‘shutdowns’ dishevelling society’s unwavering trust of worldly systems. Openings for other ways of doing and making life that emerges for Elizabeth Grosz out of difference (2011) are on our mind.

In 2021, in response to our published work, we have used post-inquiry to look into the online webinar for teachers and families we held with our daughters on the concept of ‘clock time’ and the effect of naming its power in our homes. The conversation that played out between presenters and participants produced bodyplaceblog-writing (Crinall, 2019 via Somerville, 1999), and in itself went to work loosening the imposing structures of clock time. It also raised questions about a compulsory, full-time education system that prepares us for future economic contributions. The group came to ask, how healthy is this model?

During the public webinar we encountered the revelation: We cannot ignore the voices of our children when with our bodies. This paper presents the webinar as a creative piece to follow the questions that arose into new questions for future research to consider. How do we feel / does the academy feel about the absence of the imperative practice of listening and responding between children and adults in systemic education? How do we understand ourselves in relation to suggestions we may be the ones protecting a system which we are openly critiquing but are inevitably a part of, detest and creating? And toward the solution, how might we find by way of a better way of educating when we start by acknowledging that the very foundations of the way and the what we think we need to know are faulty?

Understanding “time as diffracted through itself” (Barad, 2010, p. 244) we initially asked: how might we re-conceptualise the time structures that dictate family movements for educating and economic practices: time-to-get-the-bus, time-for-literacy, time-for-lunch, time-for-pick-up etc.? Will we become lost in a time without these markers of knowing time? During COVID-19 lockdown, time structures have been more ‘meaningless’ and perhaps we are a step closer to living what the past and future footsteps look like in our ever-present step (Barad, 2017; Blom, 2019) - how do we also understand childhood without time? Childhood is commonly perceived as a becoming into adulthood (see Rooney, 2016; Murris & Haynes, 2018). What would family and learning life look like if we were all just being and not consumed by incessant preparing? How do we ‘do’ while we ‘be?’ And move with presence rather than with the next thing, always trying to beat the clock? Ideas, stories and general sharings were threaded together and a paper emerged. Then a webinar. Writing went back and forth between families on time, and then sharing these possibilities of there being no tomorrow ( 8 year old Edie in our correspondence), where time is nothing (9 year old Xanthia), new bodyplaceblog writing was produced and conversations continued with a broader teacher and parent audience. Where children were speaking and adults listening, the pandemic lockdown opened up a nurturing learning space to which we began to examine and wanted to look again. The concept of listening, along with many post qualitative concepts, is not new as Indigenous cultures have long known and practiced these ideas prior to colonized uptake and documentation. It is acknowledged here that deep listening, Dadirri, “is a process of respectful listening.” While we have not actively taken it up as methodology we acknowledge Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Bauman’s offering – ‘Dadirri is in everyone – it is not just an ‘Aboriginal thing’ (Ungunmerr-Baumann, 1988, n.p). Dadirri is being taken up as research practice in post-qualitative theorizing (e.g. Lasczik et al., 2020; Malone & Moore, 2019) and a co-bodyspace blogging methodology. We take the body/place methodologies and listen back into the paper / webinar writings. Our intent is to ‘shake’ ‘trouble’ and ‘call’ out to the global audience from within the bodyplaceblogging writings produced across the two events so that the children can be more deeply heard where a global adult education community is listening.

During the public webinar we encountered the revelation: We cannot ignore the voices of our children when with our bodies. We invite future research to consider that the absence of the imperative practice of listening and responding between children and adults may be protecting a system which we are openly critiquing but are inevitably a part of, detest and creating. On the other side of this, we trouble in - what way of educating is found when acknowledging that the very foundations of the way and the what we think we need to know are faulty?

Barad, K. (2010). Quantum entanglements and hauntological relations of inheritance: Dis/continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and justice-to-come. Derrida Today, 3(2), 240–268. https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2010.0206 Barad, K. (2017). Troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness: Re-turning, re-membering and facing the incalculable. New Formations, 92, 56–86. https://doi.org/10.3898/NEWF:92.05.2017 Blom, S. (2019, April). Redefining time in post-truth times: Posthumanism, auto- ethnography, and parent(ing) childhoodnature in environmental education research. Paper presented at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Retrieved 8-06-2020 from the AERA Online Paper Repository. Crinall, S. (2019). Sustaining childhood natures: The art of becoming with water. Singapore: Springer. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grosz, E. (2011). Becoming undone: Darwinian reflections on life, politics and art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lasczik, A., Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, A., Cutcher, B., Cutcher, R., Cutter-Mackenzie, L., & Cutter-Knowles, F. (2020). Becoming-with as becoming-maternal: Writing with our children and companion species: A poetic and visual autoethnographic portrayal of mothering assemblages. In L. Henderson, A. L. Black, & S. Garvis (Eds.), (Re)birthing the Feminine in Academe (pp. 205–247). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38211-7_9 Malone, K. and Moore, S. J. (2019). Sensing ecology through kin and stones. The International Journal of Early Childhood Environmental Education, 7(1), p. 8-25. Malone, K. (2015). Theorizing a child–dog encounter in the slums of La Paz using post-humanistic approaches in order to disrupt universalisms in current ‘child in nature’ debates. Children's Geographies, 14(4), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2015.1077369 Martin, K., & Mirraboopa, B. (2003). Ways of knowing, being and doing: A theoretical framework and methods for indigenous and indigenist re‐search. Journal of Australian Studies, 27(76), 203–214. Murris, K., & Borcherds, C. (2019). Childing: A different sense of time. In B. D. Hodgins (Ed.), Feminist post-qualitative research for 21st-century childhoods: Common worlds methods (pp. 197–209). London: Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350056602.ch-020 Rose, D. B. (2014). Deborah Bird Rose: Country and the gift. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suSbvoAw0g4. Somerville, M. (1999). Body/landscape journals. Melbourne: Spinifex Press. St. Pierre, E. (2014). A Brief and Personal History of Post Qualitative Research: Toward ‘Post Inquiry’. Journal of curriculum theorising 30 (2): 1-19. Ungunmerr-Bauman, M. (1988). Dadirri: Inner deep listening and quiet still awareness (handout). Miriamrosefoundation.org.au. Retrieved from https://www.miriamrosefoundation.org.au/images/Dadirri_Handout.pdf