Time Passes, Will You? Exploring the Experience of Time as Chronos and Kairos in the High School Biology Classroom

This chapter will explore the often contrariant experience with time that teachers and students experience in the high school biology classroom and the impact this has on how biology is taught. The data for this research was gathered through semi structured interviews with six students and seven teachers as well as an open-ended questionnaire completed by eighty-one students enrolled in grade 12 biology in the province of Alberta, Canada. Using a hermeneutic frame, the focus of the research is to explore the participants’ experience of the biology classroom and how the concept of time emerged as concerns by both teachers and students, but in very different ways. The concept of time as chronos and kairos is explored, as well as how, most often in schools, the experience of time is embedded in assumptions of commodification from connecting chronos time to labour and economics where it can be bought, sold, and wasted as if it were a tangible product. While most experiences focused on time experienced as chronos, examples and implications as to what happens to learning when space for time experienced as kairos emerges within a classroom.