Time as a Field: Envisioning Its Qualitative and Quantitative Aspects

The chapter is aimed at providing readers with a representation of time as an extended medium where localized events can become experiences by virtue of their subjective character, and their emergence from this field can be treated as actuality from potentiality. The cognitive and perceptual sensitivity of time must be consistent with its representations for meaningful incorporation into one’s worldview. This is like the Aristotelian perspective of motion as change, which involved duration in all its examples (Espinoza in Phys Educ 40(2):139–146, 2005), thus combining qualitative and quantitative features. Such an approach can be pedagogically useful due to its comprehensive scope, and it aligns exceptionally well with the 5E’s model of instruction, which is a student-centred sequence of spatially distributed experiences. For educational research, using time as a continuum exhibiting wave-like features, which are extended but have local manifestations can help to see connections between areas where one may not initially detect commonalities.