When public preschool teachers’ classroom time is left behind

Abstract

This qualitative research study explores how US preschool teachers experience time as they grapple with linear “time for learning” policy initiatives. “Time for learning” positions children's learning as a function of the time children are engaged with learning tasks relative to the time needed for producing effective and efficient learners. This phenomenon is part of the global expansion of early childhood connected to biopolitics in which children's bodies are measured as subjects of governance and childhood becomes a temporal construct centered on society's aspirations and anxieties around children as its future citizens and economic contributors. Using van Manen's approach to interpretive phenomenology with 22 US preschool teachers who provided interviews on their experiences with reforms designed to expand their opportunities to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of learning for children with marginalized identities by providing them more time within the school day (expanding from half day to full day, or 4 days per week to 5), we found several themes: teachers’ loss of professional self, teachers’ loss of authentic self, and teachers disordering and distending “time for learning.” The findings suggest that preschool teachers in the study “played” with time in ways that spoke back to policy constraints yet also paid a price mentally due to efficiency/effectiveness expectations of the reform contexts. The discussion centers on preschool teachers’ experiences in light of older research on teachers’ consciousness and suggests that veteran preschool teachers are positioned uniquely in the struggle to resist the temporal elements of biopolitics and neoliberal reform.