On listening: Stories, play, imagination, and time

Harini Rajagopal

Children come to understand the rhythms of time—past, present, and future—gradually, through deeply human aspects like imagination and storying, in relation with themselves and the world. I wonder about how we (adults, teachers, systems) slow down time to make space for these learnings. How does our cultural habit of imposing a sense of urgency to our daily lives —often reinforcing power imbalances and disconnecting us from the need to wonder, linger, and reflect —ironically distract us from the true urgency of addressing racial, social, ecological, and cultural injustices, of being well with each other and the world?

My two school-aged children often look through their baby photos on my phone with wonder and nostalgia. As my phone throws up memories, their fingers swipe across the screen; “When was that?” they ask, giggling as their younger selves look back at them—chubby cheeks and curled toes frozen in time. We share stories and each image feels like a tender echo of moments wrapped in warmth, and stories told over and over.

The stories cradle them in a quiet kind of delighta reminder that they were once tiny.Each image, a whisper from yesterday,cradled in the palm of now—proof that they were magic once,and still are.

With my children and the children I research with, often racialised and marginalised young people, stories—family narratives, picture books, or imaginative play—function as both a bridge and a pillar. Playful storying (Dyson, 2021; Rajagopal, 2025) invites children to travel outside the here and now, becoming windows, mirrors, and sliding doors (Bishop, 1990) that construct alternative realities. Stories serve as pillars because children learn about what happened when, and why it matters, and the ability to imagine futures grounded in past understandings. Through stories and play, children reassemble past experiences, reframe future possibilities, and trace their present (Archibald, 2008; Rajagopal and Anderson, 2025; Wohlwend, 2023). Imagination, then, becomes a rehearsal space that transcends time.

This synergy between imagination and stories shapes not only how children learn but how they live in the now. Yet, in a world that is always moving forward in time, children are told to urgently prepare for becoming something other than what they are. Moving them upwards across stages and grades, propels milestones, lessons, practices, assessments, and ways of doing within society and schools. When notions of precarious times (Malone et al., 2017) and turbulent times (Arar et al., 2024) flood our inboxes, and discourses of achievement gaps (Sealey-Ruiz, 2022) and lack of readiness (Tager, 2017) inundate our educational systems, Bayo Akomolafe reminds us, “times are urgent, let us slow down” (Akomolafe and Benavides, 2016). Imagination, stories, and play invite such slowing down.

As educators and researchers participating in children’s lives, slowing down becomes not a function of speed but of awareness, intention, and attunement. Slowing down becomes not about getting answers but about questioning our questions, facing the invisible and looking at the unresolved. Listening to children creatively (Rajagopal and Kendrick, 2023; Rinaldi, 2006) as they story, play, and imagine helps us to move from witness to with-ness, and to be with children and the world in relation. This pausing, noticing, wondering, and listening becomes not only communication but also a critical imaginative space for community building, decolonizing knowledge, and countering contingency. Speculative listening also opens up practices of presencing (Nxumalo and Bozalek, 2021), oriented towards building liberatory worlds for human and more-than-human coexistents and interrupts the marginalisation of certain people, onto-epistemologies and relations from specific places. Relatedly, taking up “arts of awareness” (Tsing, 2021) and inquiring about children’s imagination become provocations for generating innovative, relational, and emergent methods to attend to the complexity of childhoods.

Wrapping up this piece and returning to the poetic magic of all children, I let their questions, stories, art, experiences, and emotions shape the flow of inquiries and the learning that unfolds from it. Stories of bike rides, bad haircuts, புத்தாண்டு celebrations, paper constructions, leaves and sticks, and drawings of family weave emotional meaning and ways of being and becoming. As neoliberal and settler colonial logics press urgency, slower attentive practices and methodologies can enhance childhood studies (Nelson, 2019) and envision more ethical ways of engaging with lives and learning.