A teacher residency’s entanglement with time: ‘We always say we will get to it, but we never do’

Abstract

‘We just do not have enough time’. A statement uttered too often in the field of education. Having taught in K-12 schools, universities, and accelerated K-12 and higher education classes, I am no stranger to the myriad of conversations on time that swirl in these spaces. All too frequently, I heard statements like: ‘there is not enough time in the schedule to do this work’, ‘time is our enemy’, ‘do the best you can with the limited time you have’, and witnessed many discussions of entanglements with time, be they individual, institutional, or structural. This article explores issues of time within hybrid/third-space working groups embedded within a teacher residency in an urban Southeastern city of the United States. In exploring the question: what role does time play in hybrid teacher residency work? This article demonstrates how time operates as a structural constraint, as a nonhuman agent, and/or is mobilized to escape/evade the nuanced and complex work of doing/thinking anti-racist abolitionist residency work across practice and theory.