Children’s environmental experiences and imaginaries as disruptions to Western educational timeframes

Jenny Renlund

Linear and abstracted notions of time, positioned as a separate tool for structuring everyday life and for measuring efficiency and progress along a continuum, are central to many educational systems and discourses (Da Rosa Ribeiro et al., 2023; Gavin, 2022). This notion of time positions the learning human as an individualised thinking mind and performs dualistic separations such as body/mind and space/time (Stirling, 2022). Here, I draw inspiration from a story my daughter shared with me when she was 10 years old, to consider how children’s temporal landscapes and imaginaries might provoke reconfigurations of time in education.

My daughter’s biggest fear is to live forever. She finds the thought of everything else on earth gradually dying and going extinct and herself remaining alive and unchanged terrifying. She imagines herself in a distant future, invulnerable and floating around in dark space, when earth has ‘finally’ been destroyed.

My daughter’s fear touches on the finitude of earth. When exploring children’s (aged 7–9) ecological imagination with my colleagues, we have encountered similar narratives from other children, who describe looming futures of the earth exploding and local landscapes being flooded or ravaged by pollution and waste (Byman et al., 2022; Kumpulainen et al., 2023; Renlund et al., 2022). Such narratives and imaginaries make evident the tensions of children’s everyday lives and highlights how educational time performs a contradiction to the actual material becoming of places and human bodies as dynamic, earthly and relational. My daughter’s vision can easily be connected to a future of climate change and ecological destruction. Simultaneously, this vision of the future touches on the material-temporal paradox surrounding the invulnerable, individual adult personhood, which the enlightenment discourse in Western educational systems celebrates as the end goal of childhood (Stirling, 2022). My daughter’s story makes tangible the absurd existence of such an independent, timeless and materially disembodied creature. Within the fear of being a static entity in a changing universe, lies the abhorrent idea of a desolate and reduced existence, disconnected from more-than-human relational lifecycles. As Stirling (2022) warns about how neoliberal education affects children’s temporal self-awareness, “growing up becomes a process not only of moving toward adulthood and therefore subjectivity but also. . .to sever relations with nonhuman worlds and view oneself as no longer entangled in common fates” (p. 39).

My daughter’s words challenge the tendency to understand temporality solely as progress or deterioration, and material decay and mortality as something undesirable. Such stories call for education to recognise and attend to the temporal complexities of contemporary childhoods. Researchers working through posthuman and new-materialist perspectives have suggested that children’s environmental experiences and imaginaries, especially connected to climate change and ecological disasters, might come to disrupt linear clock time in education (Carrizo et al., 2025; Da Rosa Ribeiro et al., 2023; Rooney and Blaise, 2023; Tammi et al., 2024). They propose that relational, materially grounded and nonlinear approaches to time resonate with the discordant, tangled and multidirectional environmental relationships of contemporary childhoods. Carrizo et al. (2025), for example, write about the temporalities of dust in early childhood education and propose that dust holds rich material sediments of various dissolving and decomposing bodies and materials across centuries, connecting “children and nonhumans to all forms of cosmological life and times” (p. 264). Through such material-temporal framings, the core of time becomes more-than-human relational movement, and conceptions of time become ontologically and ethically significant questions for education.

Understanding time through relational movement, underscores material vulnerability and porosity. As Neimanis and Walker (2014) propose, time becomes “a transcorporal stretching between present, future, and past” (p. 558). This perspective shifts us from linear conceptions of time to relational, hybrid and cyclical understandings, which resonate with Indigenous ontologies (Stirling, 2022). Such a shift, allows education to become attuned to the deep, situated ongoingness of children’s learning, relating, and becoming with landscapes and other beings, rather than merely prioritizing lofty educational goals (Rooney and Blaise, 2023; Stirling, 2022). Notions of relational movement and vulnerability can cultivate alternative kinds of temporal awareness, ethics, and future imaginings that recognise time as fleshy, immediate, thick and intensity-rich more-than-human worldings (Neimanis and Walker, 2014; Tammi et al., 2024). Consequently, engaging with the past, present, and future alongside children transforms into a slow and sticky traversing through multidirectional, rhizomatically dense material-temporal landscapes.