Jin Hui Li

Project title

TIMED - How children and youth learn time sense in educational transitions

What is your project about?

Educational transitions – from kindergarten to primary school and from lower secondary school to upper secondary education – are not only about academic demands but also about time. Children and young people must quickly learn to adapt to fixed schedules, faster tempos, and shared institutional rhythms. They are expected to arrive on time, wait their turn, meet deadlines, and regulate their emotions according to the school’s temporal norms. When this proves difficult, it is often interpreted as a behavioural problem rather than a challenge of developing a sense of time. The TIMED project investigates how children and young people from different social backgrounds learn this sense of time during educational transitions and how it shapes well-being, belonging, and learning. From a sociological perspective, time is understood as something experienced through bodies, emotions, and relationships – not merely through clocks and schedules. The project explores an overlooked dimension of education: that schools also teach children and young people how to live in institutional time.

How did you become interested in your particular field of research?

My interest in this field became particularly clear when my daughter started school. I became fascinated by how quickly children are expected to navigate the temporal structures of school life: arriving on time, following schedules, waiting their turn, and moving between activities. But how do children actually learn these skills long before they can tell the time? As a sociologist of education, I have long been inspired by Philip W. Jackson’s concept of the hidden curriculum. It has led me to focus on the norms, values, and forms of conduct that schools convey beyond formal academic content. When my daughter started school, I became curious about whether the ability to navigate institutional time might also be part of this hidden curriculum. This curiosity raised broader questions about how children develop a sense of time and how temporal expectations may shape both opportunities and inequalities in education. These questions became the starting point for the TIMED project.

What are the scientific challenges and perspectives in your project?

The key research challenge of the project is to develop a new sociological understanding of how a sense of time is learned through the interactions between children, families, and educational institutions. While research on educational transitions has traditionally focused on adaptation, well-being, and academic outcomes, TIMED investigates the often-overlooked temporal processes that shape children’s opportunities for participation and belonging. Through a longitudinal and multi-sited design, the project follows children across key educational transitions and develops a new theoretical framework for temporal learning as a social and sensory practice. In doing so, the project contributes new knowledge about how institutional temporal demands help shape well-being, learning, and social inequality in education.

What is your estimate of the impact, which your project may have to society in the long term?

In the longer term, the project can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of children’s well-being, participation, and sense of belonging within education. By making visible how institutional temporal demands shape the everyday lives of children and young people, the research can provide a new knowledge base for teachers, educational professionals, and policymakers working with educational transitions and student well-being. The project may help identify often-overlooked mechanisms behind exclusion, school absenteeism, and educational inequality. At the same time, the theoretical concept of temporal learning may have relevance beyond education and inspire research into how institutional temporal structures shape people’s opportunities for participation and belonging in society more broadly.

Which impact do you expect the Sapere Aude programme will have on your career as a researcher?

Receiving a Sapere Aude: DFF Research Leader grant means a great deal to me. It allows me to take the next step as a research leader and build an independent research environment focused on social inequality, educational transitions, and institutional processes in education. The grant comes at a particularly important moment, as it creates strong synergies with my current DFF-funded project on children’s educational transitions and vulnerability. Together, the two projects provide an opportunity to develop a coherent research programme that explores how children experience and navigate educational transitions, and how these experiences are shaped by social and institutional conditions. For me, the grant is both a significant recognition of my work and a unique opportunity to develop new research ideas, strengthen international collaborations, and make a stronger international contribution to the field.