Timescapes of Educational Research and Development

Over the last few decades, the higher education landscape across the world has changed and time has become a commodity with efficiency as a key metric. In this chapter, we will, therefore, use the concept of timescapes as a lens to explore how various educational research and development processes unfold in higher education and how they are embedded in and entangled with administrative and academic practices and narratives. Using the Norwegian higher education sector as a contextual starting point, we will describe three different levels that impact timescapes of educational research and development: politics, policies, and practices. We argue that these levels are central and deeply entangled and therefore need to be understood together. From the contextual examples, we observe a compression of time frames that risks losing sight of long-term goals due to a perceived urgency, an alteration of timing, tempo and sequence of educational research and development, as well as conflicting understandings of temporal modalities at the three levels. Based on these observations, we discuss the different structural elements of timescapes and how they shape and are shaped by relations and experiences on the three levels. In addition, we highlight four resistance practices commonly used by academics in response to ever-increasing demands in conflicting timescapes and discuss their limitations. Finally, we argue that questions about timescapes are at the same time questions about power and that academics need to take back ownership in negotiating futurescapes of higher education. We conclude by emphasising the importance of considering timescapes as a fundamental part of educational research and development. Academics need to take back ownership in negotiating futurescapes of higher education.