Being ‘Lazy’ and Slowing Down: Toward decolonizing time, our body, and pedagogy

Abstract

In recent years, scholars have critiqued norms of neoliberal higher education (HE) by calling for embodied and anti-oppressive teaching and learning. Implicit in these accounts, but lacking elaboration, is a concern with reformulating the notion of ‘time’ and temporalities of academic life. Employing a coloniality perspective, this article argues that in order to reconnect our minds to our bodies and center embodied pedagogy in the classroom, we should disrupt Eurocentric notions of time that colonize our academic lives. I show how this entails slowing down and ‘being lazy’.

Keywords: :

• coloniality
• temporal
• embodied pedagogy
• higher education
• teaching and learning

Notes

1. Ng’s theorization of the body differs from that put forth by John Dewey (1938). While the latter is influential in addressing the mental/manual split and continues to have salience in centering experience in learning process and practice, Dewey still assumes an ontological mind–body split, and insufficiently addresses the spiritual dimension of embodied experience.

2. Embodied pedagogy presumes that we are ‘attentive to our bodies and its experiences as a way of knowing’ (Freiler, 2008, p. 40). By anti-oppressive education, I mean a classroom pedagogy that addresses the myriad ways in which racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and other forms of subjugation and oppression play out in educational institutions as well as broader society (Kumashiro, 2000).