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Abstract
What we have come to understand as education has a temporal dimension: the school year, progression based on time, timetables, and so on. Similarly, our understanding of teaching is framed by temporality, primarily through salary structures and an implicit coupling of performance with time in the field. We argue that this underlying generative temporality is under revision. This revision is taking place through policy moves such as the professional standards agenda, which unlike salary structures (at least current ones) privilege demonstrable performance over tenure. Such a revision places time not as an external measure in which events and practices take place, but as the very core of such practices and events. Taking stimulus from the role of work-integrated learning within initial teacher education, we engage with this revision of temporality in education. With increasing attention being paid to temporality in scholarship across a number of disciplines, there has arguably never been a more appropriate opportunity to engage with the temporality of teaching.
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the thoughtful feedback provided by the anonymous reviewers who challenged us to go beyond our initial theorisation and provide greater clarity in our argument.
Notes
1. While we acknowledge the use of this binary within some discourses, we do not accept its simplistic use and mobilise the phrase here as an example of the use of the term in other contexts, without necessarily accepting in underlying generative assumptions.
2. The 2-year Master of Teaching, which serves as an initial teacher education program for candidates who already have a university degree requires 50 days. For the purpose of this article, our focus is solely on 4-year programs.
3. Following Bourdieu – who himself was building on the work of Pascal, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty – we mobilise the notion of ‘ontological complicity’ to reflect the relations between the actor and the social world. Working specifically from Pascal, Bourdieu notes, when an individual ‘encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a “fish in water”: it does not feel the weight of the water, and it takes the world about itself for granted’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, Citation1992 [1992], p. 127). Because of the embedded and embodied nature of the pre-service and in-service teacher, we claim that this ontological complicity requires engagement in the pursuit of rigorous and robust scholarship.
4. As a case in point, should a pre-service teacher be experiencing difficulties meeting the necessary standards expected of them, it is possible for the school to decide to extend their placement (or internship) to enable them time (e.g. 1–2 weeks during the internship) to attain the necessary standard.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Scott Eacott
Scott Eacott is Associate Professor and Leader of the Contemporary Thought and Analysis in Educational Leadership, Management and Administration (ELMA) Research Group in the Faculty of Education and Arts at the Australian Catholic University. His research interests and contribution to educational leadership fall into three main areas: theorising leadership practice; school leadership preparation and development; and re-conceptualising strategy in the education context. Scott is currently working on a funded project investigating leadership capacity building with a regional school system and writing a book that develops a sophisticated theory and methodology for the study of educational leadership, management and administration. Email: [email protected]
Kimbalee Hodges
Kimbalee Hodges is a teacher in the hunter valley and completed her honours degree at the University of Newcastle under the supervision of Associate Professor Scott Eacott, for which she was awarded first class and a Faculty medal.