“Where do we find the time to do this?” Struggling Against the Tyranny of Time

Abstract

For the past five years, the University of New Brunswick (UNB) Early Childhood Centre, working with childcare educators, has been researching, piloting, and developing curriculum materials and workshops for infants, toddlers, and other children. As we move in and out of university and daycare spaces where “people are not equally located” (Eyre, 2007, p. 99), our work is rifled with contradictions and ethical tensions. Out of this complex and contradictory landscape, we hear and ask many recursive questions. The question we problematize in this article is: Where do we find the time to do this? (Foucault, 1984; Marshall, 2007). Questions such as this incite experiments and interpretations that enliven and invigorate our pedagogical co-authorings in order to reimagine ourselves and our worlds (Olson, 2005). Our critical examination of experimentations and interpretations provoked through three communally produced texts uncovers how educators both slide into and disrupt cultural orientations toward individualism, deficit, and the tyranny of clock time.