ABSTRACT
This chapter will explore the diverse temporalities of student and curriculum time considered within the overall policy framework of higher education which privileges the ‘present future’ (Adam & Groves 2007, Clegg 2010). Based on my research into the introduction of personal development planning (Clegg 2010) I have argued that employability and the vocationalisation (Wheelahan 2010) of higher education involves a particular orientation towards an assumed future. In this chapter I want to extend this analysis and consider the ways in which different disciplines possess their own distinctive temporal structures drawing on Karl Maton's (2014) elaboration of legitimation code theory and suggest that the temporalities of different disciplinary curricula embody distinctive epistemic and social relations. This matters because higher education is hierarchically structured and disciplines are unevenly distributed across the field. Access to what Wheelahan (2010) and Young (2008a & b) call ‘powerful knowledge’ is also unevenly distributed. Powerful knowledge is knowledge, which gives access to better, more reliable explanations of the world and abstract ways of thinking which ‘provides learners with a language for engaging in political, moral and other kinds of debates’ (Young 2008b : 14). Inequalities in access to powerful knowledge are compounded by the variations in both scheduled and private study time between disciplines and between universities (HEPI 2013) and the different pressures on students to undertake paid work and engage in other activities outside the curriculum. Rather than a unified temporality higher education has diverse times and timings and social inequalities are significant in understanding the experiences of students in time present of time past and time future (Araújo 2005). The lived realities of time present are structurally constrained and reflexively mediated across this uneven temporal field (Clegg & Bufton 2008). Epistemic and social access to curricula and to powerful knowledge, therefore, involves paying attention to these different time frames.
