Specialists distinguish between different phases in the development of children’s temporal awareness. Studies by developmental psychologists describe a sensomotoric phase of temporal perception which lasts until a child begins to speak. As language develops, this is followed by an action-schematic experience of time in which time is understood based on perceptions of space and objects. Only at about the age of eight does this concrete understanding of time gradually give way to a “full notion of time.”47 As Simone Wissing has shown, pedagogy has moved away from this linear concept, which operates with a scientific concept of time as a yardstick and therefore equates psychological time with physical time.48 Alongside individual cognitive skills, social competences gained through experience and action are seen as equally significant to temporal awareness, meaning that they should also be incorporated into educational approaches.
“Efforts are being made to introduce new approaches to starting school and the first lessons, and the factor of time plays a key role in these. Discussions of school readiness, heterogeneity in learning groups, the possibility of remaining at the first stage of school for differing amounts of time, and individual support […] demonstrate a changed consciousness of children’s life circumstances and the needs arising from these.”49 When more flexible models are developed for children starting school, awareness of time has to be considered not only in cognitive terms, but also in relation to emotions and activities, and children have to be given the corresponding support.
Jacob, the boy in my case study, lives in Geneva, where children start school already at four or five. They are supposed to undergo a gradual transition from the freedom of play to teaching situations in which they concentrate on solving exercises. In the first years of school, there are not yet any grades, but children are assessed each term according to nine rules of classroom behavior. First they are asked to assess themselves. Since they cannot read yet, the rules of behavior are represented by pictures and the evaluation criteria by emoticons. Rather than ranging from ‘good’ to ‘unsatisfactory’, the scale uses temporal terms, relating to how frequently children act as they are supposed to: from ‘always’ to ‘never’. The scale defines what behavior should be like, and what is assessed is obedience, i.e. the extent to which each child conforms to the pre-determined rules. Once the children have completed their self-assessment, teachers add their own assessment in a second column. This means that the evaluation is less like a school report and more like a test: Jacob learned from the first evaluation that he has to assess himself more negatively in order to ensure that the teacher agrees and puts a tick next to his emoticon. In a sense, his emotions were corrected. While he drew a happy face next to all the points in the first assessment, the faces in the second assessment almost all had an expressionless straight line for a mouth. Although this demonstrated that he was a quick learner, it also showed a decline in his motivation. He no longer enjoyed going to school.
As I discussed the project with Jacob’s mother and she shared her concerns about protecting his perspective, I discovered new ways to understand asynchronicity in relation to the themes of ‘school as a location of fitting in’ and ‘refusal to participate’. Difficulties in adapting draw attention to the normative functions of the education system. Investigating Jacob’s asynchronicity did not mean getting into psychological explanations or interpretations, but using film to investigate his perspective and temporal agency.The intelligence tests and concentration tests which Jacob underwent to check for Attention Deficiency Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) formed a further starting point for the concept of the film. But I wanted to draw attention to the parallels and disconnects between the different logics and worlds of perception of Jacob and the world of adults [N/L/T]. Going beyond resistance to ‘rationalized’ time, the aim of this experiment was to inquire into the educational possibilities of children’s spontaneous, fantastical, and idiosyncratic temporalities. How should/can learning and knowing take place in the uncertainty of the current epoch and the experience of temporal heterogeneity? In a world which is always changing rapidly, what enables us to find our way and adapt?
“At school, I have to learn what I don’t know,” says the protagonist of Marguerite Duras’ Ah! Ernesto after his first day at school, explaining to his mother why he does not want to go anymore. Duras’ children’s book was published in 1971 and arose from her long-standing interest in what knowledge, ability, and learning ought to mean, and how they were defined by educational institutions.50 With Ernesto’s paradoxical expression of refusal, she aimed to question existing definitions. According to Duras, Ernesto’s statement could mean that people were teaching him knowledge but not enabling him to reach new realizations. Or that he was being taught things he was not interested in knowing. “In other words: they don’t let me learn not to learn, to make use of myself.”51 Deeply shaped by the demands of social change in the 1960s and 1970s, these questions about independence and responsibility in children have retained their relevance, even when the role of autonomy has a different resonance in today’s context of accelerated climate change and an uncertain future. Because who knows or who should decide what needs to be learned in order to be best prepared for the unknown realities ahead? In any case, isn’t it the established dominant worldviews, languages, ethics etc. that need to be unlearned to overcome the current destructive mode of civilization?
The staging of the game Jeux impairs as a film performance is designed in two ways as a reprise: it is both a reprise of the material from observations and conversations with Jacob, as the memory cards being used relate directly to the evaluation process and faced the boy with a new ‘test situation’, and also a reprise of the material from Duras’ text, adapted into a film by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Their short film En rachâchant (1982)52 had a strong influence on the experiment, in both content and form.
Firstly, I was influenced by Straub and Huillet’s specific approach to Duras’ literary text, which does not mean adapting it into a film in the sense of staging the material to ‘bring the text to life’ through illusion and interpretation, but instead involves reading and working with the text. As in all their films, the diction and pauses in the spoken text are rearranged – in an unusual, ‘unnatural’ way – so that the text sounds more like a poem and its musicality comes to the fore.
Secondly, I was influenced by Straub and Huillet’s performative understanding of the shooting situation. They prepare the text meticulously, the (mainly non-professional) actors practice for weeks to learn a particular pronunciation (as well as learning the whole text by heart), and the locations and individual shots are prepared systematically and in detail. But as soon as the shoot begins, coincidence and unpredictability, including sound from the surroundings, become equally as crucial as the planned aspects, such as the carefully chosen locations, props, and framing. In the process of filming, everything becomes a relevant part of the film: “[…] everything here is information – even the pure sensual reality of the space that the performers leave vacant at the end of each act.”53 Straub and Huillet’s films have been described as a “school of reading and writing,”54 which is doubly true of their seven-minute ‘children’s film’ En rachâchant: ultimately, the story is about what should be learned at school, and how.
Perception is not simply seeing, but always interacts with categories, concepts and habits which structure our thinking. En rachâchant explores this through various means. The props (globe, blackboard, butterfly) and the camerawork (shot/reverse shot, bird’s-eye view/worm’s-eye view) make it clear that perspective is already more than just seeing: where something is visible, it is not only seen but already interpreted. Ernesto wants to escape such internalized categorizations – he does not want to label things with pre-existing, pre-determined meanings, but to explore them phenomenologically and give them different names. Calling the butterfly which has been pinned inside a glass case by its taxonomical name would be the proof of knowledge which the adults expect. Ernesto, however, dares to call it “a crime”.
When the teacher asks him how he plans to learn things he already knows, Ernesto is quick to answer: “En rachâchant.” What is that supposed to mean? A new method, says Ernesto. The neologism which Straub and Huillet chose for the title of their film sounds similar to the French word for “research” – en recherchant.55 It also has many other onomatopoeic echoes, such as ruminating/brooding (en ruminant, en ressassant, en rabâchant), liberating/loosening/relaxing (en relâchant), buying back/redeeming (en rachetant), becoming enraged (en enrageant), whispering/murmuring (en chuchotant) etc.56 – all forms of activity which have something do with repetition and/or change in action and in tonality or emotion.
My experiment with Jeux impairs did not model itself on Duras’ text or Straub and Huillet’s film in terms of content, but referred to them by adopting specific elements (such as the prologue as a direct quote of the film’s beginning; props and framing). Apart from the thematic connections (the first day of school; no longer wanting to go to school; the willfulness of children), the point was to test out the filming situation as a set of rules for temporal regimes [N is for Normality Principle] and a playground for temporalities [T is for Tabletop, for Tricks, for Trust], as well as the resulting recordings as a ‘school of (temporal) perception.’ Instead of a text, the memory game took on a role like that of a musical score. This set of images and rules orchestrated the action: the images on the cards are either recognized or not, and they show situations which Jacob himself has experienced, such as school (evaluation) and games, or they show places and things that are unfamiliar to him, such as a pile of rubble. As the cards are repeatedly revealed and covered up, images should be recognized, pairs should be identified and their locations should be remembered, so that they can then be revealed simultaneously. Jacob recognizes the images in the memory game when he remembers what is being shown. But he also sees (reads?) unexpected and invisible things [L is for Leeway, for Lightsaber, for Loopholes]. The investigation of asynchronicity consisted mainly in finding deviations and leeway among the implicit and explicit rules which emerge in the staging of the memory game (and of the storyboard). The forms of adaptation created in this setting allow us to trace different perspectives, interpretations, shifts in attention and differing perceptions.
