What Happens Next? Working the Time Dimension of Educational Research

Immense, all-encompassing bush fires. Paralyzing floods. The global pandemic. The seemingly endless stream of disasters that beset us may be rationalized in terms of the move from the benign Holocene wherein human civilization flourished, to the malign Anthropocene, through which we are creating the conditions for our own extinction. Education and its research sit in the middle of this epochal shift. Scientific investigation establishes and verifies what has happened in the past, including the patterns and rhythms that may continue. However, education, as defined by learning in the present is also concerned with the future, especially in terms of the proven facts of climate change and collectively working out what to do about them. Subsequently, this chapter will argue that a new science of educational research is required to shift pedagogy, the curriculum, and educational practice from its current settings to ones that will provoke meaningful change in the Anthropocene. This new science of educational research will be based on a re-evaluation of time in educational research from the work of Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, Gilbert Simondon, Stanislaw Lem and Philip K. Dick. In general, this theorization of a new science of time in educational research sees a shift from phenomenologically based notions of temporality to materially embodied concepts of time that simultaneously inhabit ‘more-than-human’ worlds.