By LUIZ MENNA-BARRETO*
School timetable policy ignores students in their temporalities
1.
This is the third essay in a series on possible, and eventually desirable, readings of the scenarios that mark the various stages of our lives. In the first essay, “The dialectic of aging”, I share criticisms of the prevailing individualism that prevents us from understanding this terminal phase of our lives. In the second, “The dialectic of adolescence” I propose reading this phase as a moment of construction of a temporal identity that may perhaps help us in what sometimes constitutes a tumultuous coexistence.
In this essay on childhood, I seek to explore a valuable concept from the field of studies on evolution, the concept of “temporal niche,” which may perhaps enrich our readings and strategies for early childhood education. My readings of these three phases of our lives (old age, adolescence, and childhood) are always marked by the search for the temporalities that are present there, inviting observations about facts that often go unnoticed.
Many of my contributions can be read as invitations to research projects in the area of human development from the point of view of its temporal dimension. Today, I like to identify myself as someone who proposes a critical biology, which can be defined as a frontier area and, therefore, a supposed vanguard that navigates the field of interdisciplinarity. I start from the notion that organisms can, and perhaps should, be analyzed as bearers of histories, both of the species and of individuals.
Temporality in human life can be observed in the early stages of gestation, when maternal rhythms (sleep/wake, activity/rest, feeding/fasting and social interaction) are present in the uterine environment. This is a topic that still deserves much study, on how these maternal rhythms can modulate the activity/rest cycles in embryos.
There are clear technological challenges in recording rhythms in the uterine environment that still need to be resolved, but there is no reason to conclude that they are irrelevant and have no future consequences. I will not discuss birth times here, but there is certainly much to learn there as well; a look at traditional knowledge can be enlightening.
Once born, babies are exposed to different cycles, from the light/dark environment to feeding times, including interactions with people around them. So we can already see how babies' reactions are present in the construction of their temporal identity – there are babies who “sleep like angels” and babies who “cry all the time”, but either way, these expressions show how babies' behaviors already influence domestic times.
It is possible to record the baby's light/dark cycle and activity through diaries; at this point it seems possible to identify the process of construction of the temporal niche in early childhood. One limitation of recording in the form of these diaries is the difficulty of noting the opening/closing of the babies' eyes (after all, closed eyes prevent the entry of light), and therein lies a gap in the literature, as it disregards the fact that babies react to what would be the real light/dark at this stage of life, and not just how they are subjected to the light/dark of the environment.
2.
The future repercussions, I mean in adult life, of this initial moment are also an open question. These repercussions may help us understand our morning-afternoon preferences in adult life, after all, diversity is very present in the numerous studies available on the subject (Chauhan, S. et al. 2023), although the authors of these studies mostly do not contemplate the process of constructing this diversity.
The way adults around babies react to their manifestations is always revealing, and perhaps this will constitute a more or less lasting mark on our behavior. I will stop here and move on to school life, more precisely preschool life, a moment that I understand to be revealing of the construction of the so-called “temporal niche” (Hut et al, 2012).
Several questions about the construction of the temporal niche in early childhood education can be suggested here. One example is the question about how we teach our children about time. The possible astonishment of readers here is perfectly understandable, because we adults “know” that time exists and that it is a natural phenomenon, independent of our culture. Therefore, I start from the distinct notion, in which time is an abstraction, a cultural construction, where it has its roots – hence the notion according to which we can understand and evaluate the diversity of calendars (Birth, 2012).
I bet most of you will say that time is taught at home and in schools in the form of showing clocks and teaching how to “tell the time”. And that it is natural that it should be this way. I say that it is not, and that we should think about developing richer alternatives, ways that take into account the state of children’s bodies, and this can be done by asking “what do you feel like doing right now?”
This procedure, performed in a group of children, will reveal differences between them when they are asked to choose between studying, eating, playing, sleeping, etc. Then the teacher organizes a conversation and seeks consensus on the schedule for the next activity. By doing so, she will be “teaching time” to the children, teaching them that there is always a negotiation between those involved, almost always hidden, but now experienced. Even if the teacher’s will ends up prevailing, the social nature of the negotiation will be highlighted by the procedure.
3.
This alternative method of “teaching time” has been developed by one of my graduate students, Bruna Seijo, in her recently completed master’s degree. This “teaching time” strategy was informally tested on children between the ages of four and six by teacher Marilva Silva Gonçalves (then the Pedagogical Coordinator at an EMEI). In this observation, we noted a marked diversity in the preferences shown by the children when asked what they would like to do, but at that time we did not pay attention to the negotiation process as part of the pedagogy involved.
Below, I share two reflections on issues that populate the early childhood education environment. The first of these was derived from our observations of sleep episodes in the environment of municipal early childhood education schools (EMEIS) in the city of São Paulo. I was invited to a conversation with EMEIS directors in April 1992. To my surprise and joy, the meeting was attended by the then Municipal Secretary of Education during the Luisa Erundina administration, the late Prof. Paulo Freire, with whom I had a fascinating conversation about school schedules.
At that meeting, I learned that children attended these schools in three shifts, one of which, from late morning to early afternoon (11 am to 15 pm), included lunch. When I heard this from an audience of school leaders, I said that many children probably slept at that time. Upon hearing this assumption, there was a general protest from the audience, “They don’t sleep at my school!” A survey we conducted later showed that yes, many children did indeed sleep in the early afternoon, and we even saw a teacher sleeping at that time. The lack of a “sleep policy” was quite evident, or rather, the current policy ignored students in their temporalities.
The subsequent developments in early childhood education in the city of São Paulo have not shown evidence of the implementation of better-informed timetables in the temporal organization of schools. A recent demonstration of our way of thinking about school timetables was presented at the celebration of Paulo Freire's 100th birthday, an event organized by the USP School of Education. The text “The organization of school time: a proposal inspired by Paulo Freire” in which we propose a process for deliberating school timetables taking into account teachers, staff and students. This process can be adapted to any level of education, and can also be used as a field for reflection on family life.
*Luiz Menna-Barreto is a retired “senior” full professor of biomedical sciences at EACH-USP. He is the author of, among other books, History and Perspectives of Chronobiology in Brazil and Latin America (edusp).[https://amzn.to/4i0S6Ti]
References
Birth, K. Objects of Time, Pallgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Chauhan, S. et al. Beyond Sleep: a multidimensional model of chronotype. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 148: 1-14, 2023.
Roelof, A. Hut. et al. In search of a temporal niche: environmental factors. Progress in Brain Research, 281-304, 2012.
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