Time Literacy

Evaluation: How is your system working for you? Evaluating involves considering how your choice of time representation and routines you’re trying are actually working, and trying to tweak your system, particularly if and when assignments/tasks are piling up and stress levels are rising. Identity: Who are you, and what do you need? We see well-being and thriving as just as important as academic progress. This means that who you are—whether neurodivergent, experiencing stress and anxiety, working one or more jobs, experiencing depression—is a central component to developing healthy time literacy skills. Time Literacy as compared to time management. Traditional notions of time management too often reflects productivity alone. Departing from a sole emphasis on productivity, time literacy seeks to center the individual, including one’s well-being and thriving, as necessary components to academic progress. The time literacy framework illuminates support for undergrads in pursuit of the college degree that are neurodivergent, and has the potential to decenter capitalist and ableist notions of how productivity is achieved. Reflective of Western, ableist, and capitalist views, traditional notions of time management too often do not reflect the needs of non-dominant groups such as neurodivergent students.Time literacy also positions the role of representations of time as potentially transformative to one’s academic progress. In the past century, research in time management has largely come out of the field of business management that positions time management as a skill to advance one’s vocational pursuits. We view effective time management as a cultural practice relevant within particular conditions, such as higher education or industrialized cultural contexts. From a sociopolitical perspective and with respect to power and identity, time literacy skills have the capacity to bridge access to markers of social capital, such as the college degree. For this reason, we frame time literacy as one that may enable access to opportunity and capital. As Nasir and McKinney de Royston (2013) state, “it is through participation in cultural practices, and the taking up of the respective identities affiliated with those practices, that forms of capital are created; thus access to participation in cultural practices is an aspect of power” (p. 276). In other words, from a sociopolitical perspective, access to effective time literacy skills is an aspect of gaining capital and power. Time in Early Childhood and Elementary Grades. What should children learn about time, and when should they learn it? Time is a ubiquitous component of our everyday lives, and in fact digital clocks in particular are now pervasive on commonly used devices. In fact, such availability together with the relative ease with which even young children can read the numerals on digital clocks may (falsely) suggest that time is straightforward topic to understand. Not only do I disagree with such an assertion, but I also contend that time is a foundational topic across STEM areas and in everyday life that, at present, is challenging for students to understand. My research has sought to understand how children develop ideas related to time and duration and how the very words we use are interwoven with how we make sense of time. At present and with funding from the Spencer Foundation, we are investigating how children’s and families’ everyday activities contribute to knowledge of informal and formal time units.