Publish at December 12 2012 Updated May 10 2023
Like school rhythms, the organization of school time is an issue in educational reform but one that has received little media attention. Indeed, for ages it has remained unchanged despite variations in programs and curricula. Aniko Husti will write to this effect:
"One of the most outdated dimensions of secondary education is certainly its use of time, since the educational institution has adopted and imposed throughout our century the same concept of time, while continually setting new goals."
To the question of possible change in the organization of school time, she will answer in the affirmative. In the 1980s, she conducted experiments on new ways of using time in school, the subject of four videos produced at the time by the National Institute for Pedagogical Research (INRP).
The timetable, it is said, in one of these videos is the traditional framework within which the lives of all the partners in the school community are organized: students, teachers and parents.
In interviews with these different school partners, Aniko Husti shows that the timetable as we know it is a problem of the school. Frozen and designed to be so, the timetable does not encourage pedagogical innovation.
The timetable is not designed to encourage pedagogical innovation.
In the opinion of some teachers themselves, this schedule would not take into account daily biological rhythms and seasonal variations which has an impact on productivity and on students' learning abilities. However, the traditional timetable is natural. Each school actor expects at the beginning of the school year to have a schedule, even if it means to undergo it later consciously or not.
Aniko Husti's work does not question the existence of a schedule, but it aims to make it more flexible so as to give more space to the acquisition of knowledge and its deepening by students, rather than to its rapid presentation in a very limited time.
Moreover, A. Husti insists on the fact that by using time differently, "we get out of a closed system to go into an open system", which allows and encourages interactions between the actors of the school all mobilized for the management of time according to the educational project. For the division of time in fact covers the division of content, and therefore the division of meaning, according to A. Husti. This problem of splitting time/content/meaning is really topical, and we mentioned it on Thot in its declination of distance learning.
This work provides evidence that the reorganization of school time is possible in all disciplines and at all levels. By breaking with the model based on the fixed hourly duration and the single rhythm, we achieve another pedagogy that improves the effectiveness of teaching.
Moving time, experimenting with school rhythms. Aniko Husti, NPRI
Photo: Leo Reynolds, Flickr, license CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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