Educational Ecotopes: A Postformal Problematization of Time in Educational Research

This chapter problematizes Western progress narratives and linear notions of time using postformal thinking, co-autoethnography and metaphor. The authors describe the features of Western positivist thinking and detail postformalism as a framework for disrupting formal, reductionistic notions of time that reinforce Western notions of progress. Through a postformal analysis of the authors’ autobiographical narratives, they demonstrate the artificiality of linear notions of time and progress in learning and propose ecotopes, or discrete micro ecosystems, as a different way to think about learning and learners in order to respect and value the present as learning unfolds.