Understanding and Nurturing Emergence—Explorations of the Temporality of Being and Becoming in Higher Education Contexts

This chapter examines the temporal dimensions in two distinct teacher education contexts which we independently researched. One higher education context is an elective postgraduate unit of a music teacher education programme which sought to develop musical affinity and pedagogic discernment through musically inspired movement as well as visualised and verbalised self-reflection. The data include video recordings of the sessions, creative products (paintings, drawings), and students’ self-reflective compositions. The second context is a 10-day intensive programme (IP) with students of education from eight European higher education institutions using arts-based, interdisciplinary approaches to develop pedagogical responses to working well with diversity as an inherent feature of education. The dataset includes participants’ reflective sketchbooks, video recordings of group presentations and written compositions. This chapter is a dialogue between the different philosophical orientations about space and time, a dialogue between the two distinct datasets, and a dialogue between us, teacher-researchers of these contexts. Bringing together the philosophy of Natural Inclusionality and Bakhtin’s phenomenological dialogism, we revisit our findings through the notion of (multi)temporality. We unpack the ways in which space and time were managed and related to in these two educational environments, and how the students experienced the temporality of their learning. The theoretical and empirical insights offered in this chapter call for a careful reconsideration of the importance of time and its intrinsic connection with space in education.