Young pupils’ articulations of time spent in school in the wake of a policy reform

Abstract

Advancing the ‘temporal turn’ in the sociology of education, this article explores how a strong national discourse on the length of the school day influences pupils’ articulations of their temporal experiences. The discourse of ‘the long school day’ emerged as part of a fierce debate on the implications of a Danish school reform passed in 2014. We use a discourse-analytical framework to examine focus group data from pupils aged 8–12 to show how the discursive context of the reform influences the pupils’ articulations of their temporal experiences. The pupils’ reproduction of the adult discourse of ‘the long school day’ conceals a diversity in temporal experiences and reduces them to being a concern about the number of clock hours spent in school. To understand the broader impact of pupils’ temporal experiences of their school day, we need to rethink the linearity between clock hours and articulations of time.