On Linearity, Academic Time, and Evaporating Sources

This week I have had a lot of interconnected ideas floating in my head. I was thinking this week, which was a short week with a holiday here on Monday, how much academic time assumes a linearity that is supposed to bring increased productivity. These are things that I have thought about many times, especially in relation to neuronormative framing in academe. That everything, everyone, and all the systems assume that things will be done or accessed in some sort of linear manner.

Think of modules in a course and how folk assume that folk will go through the modules in numbered order, or through the pages or resources in the module in a certain order as organized on the screen. But some users and learners do not interact with material in that way. Some folk see connections between topics that others don't see, not even the members of the teaching team, and they then navigate the module in a way that makes meaning for them, which may not be the same way that makes meaning for others. Sometimes in design this linearity is forced by putting release conditions on things - telling the user that you have to select a certain thing, or finish a certain thing before another thing appears. Sometimes it makes design sense to do this, especially if there are assessment pieces attached. However, sometimes these thing are just done for the sake of doing it, the hiding being part of some pedagogical strategy that may not be clear, even to the designer.

I've talked about and written about time a lot. It is probably one of my favourite things to think about, besides accessible pedagogy, but also probably because it has a lot to do with accessible pedagogy. But it is also interesting to me that for the amount of times that I have talked or written about time, I never decided to make time a label for my posts. Because you see that is some sort of linear thinking, that somehow years ago I would have had the foresight to know that there would be a lot of time chatter on this blog as it relates to pedagogy. But rather this time focus has been more iterative in nature; it has cropped up in conversations, in things that I have read, in assessments I have seen. 

Today I tried to play a bit of catch up in terms of journal articles I had saved since the beginning of September to read. I had over 20 articles and I would say at least 4 of those were focused on time. Time seems to be a real theme right now in academic spaces, and kind of always has been because well there never seems to be enough time or at least that is what folk say. "How was your reading week?" "Oh I wish I had more time!" Or, "How was your vacation?" "Oh not long enough." We have heard these things so often, because time is one of those things that is both present and absent at the same time in academic spaces.

Time guides program completion. Time guides promotion and tenure schedules. Time both expands (when you submit an article for review and then crickets for over a year as they try to find someone to review) and then contracts (when they give you something like 5 days to review proofs before the article is published). This is why I often say time isn't real. Or at least the way we think of it isn't real (and a lot of folk need to read some Bergson). 

I came across a nice open article in my pile of articles today that I am noting below in the Change the Narrative resource for the week about time as affect in higher ed and the impact it can have to decolonize those spaces. I mean all of those comments noted above around time is because of the belief that we can't change time. It is a really interesting article and you should read it...if you have time :)

But the other thing that is connected to time, and taking time, and having time, is that belief that we will read or engage or do a thing, when we have time. And I have been thinking about this in relation to resources such as articles and websites and how we live in a time where there is no real guarantee that the source will be there once we decide to get to it. I mean one of the posts that I wrote for a higher ed space about how the for all narrative is harmful is actually one that doesn't exist on the web anymore unless you use the way back machine because the group folded and stopped maintaining their website that had a bunch of great resources that are now gone. 

I found a human on LinkedIn the other day that I used to interact with a fair bit on Twitter and we were both talking about how a lot of the resources and ideas that were shared on academic Twitter are now gone. Information, ideas, connections, evaporated, lost to time. Unless someone has saved it somewhere for posterity to share in other ways. So time and resources are definitely connected. Often we see time as the only non expandable resource. But we also fail to live in the moment or to recognize the moments for what they are until it is much later. Saying yes to writing a chapter in June when November seems so far away, has a different vibe when November is in 2 weeks.

Students have a different perspective and perception of time than the teaching team. Some family members have a different understanding of time than other members. Time is important in ways that we often don't realize until that time or moment is gone. The French "l'esprit de l'escalier" is a saying that has that temporal awareness built in. But then of course I take the time to reflect as I type that sentence and wonder how to make such a saying more inclusive to those who are the bottom of the stairs because the elevator is out of service again. Of course I did, because that is how my mind works, my staircase wit always in the service of inclusion, my short blog posts over a 1000 words that I will wrap up now. 

Change the Narrative Resource

Shahjahan, R. A., & Zembylas, M. (2025). Theorizing clock time-as-affect in the decolonization of higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2025.2562939