Over the past year or so, the pedagogical (teaching and learning) team at Mother Duck have been exploring the idea of ‘slow time’ and what this might mean as we work with and alongside the children, we welcome each day into our settings. In a very fast-paced and crowded world, where time is seemingly of the essence and being ‘so busy’ is a catch cry heard everywhere, we have made a decision to slow down our work, and children’s work, so that we are able to savour each moment on the pathway of learning.

We recently had the great privilege to work with Professor Alison Clark from the UK, as part of our ongoing professional learning experiences. Professor Clark (2024) has just published a book called “Slow knowledge and the unhurried child”, in which I was interviewed about the practices we have been embedding at Mother Duck since 2015. The appreciation of slowing down teaching and learning is now a world-wide movement, beginning in Italy with the idea of slow food, and now embraced by early childhood settings all over the globe in order to reclaim time for childhood.

It would seem we have become impatient with childhood, to insist children do things and learn things as quickly as possible – such as attitudes toward “preparing children for school” – and therefore possibly overlooking the presence of the child in front of us in favour of our own (adult) desires for children’s futures. Perhaps we can consider moving away from children who are in the year of being four years old, spending it preparing to be five, but rather spending the year enjoying the only time in their life that they will be four. At Mother Duck, we have asked ourselves how we might make time for children’s learning and development to occur and be supported by educators who understand this takes ‘slow time’.

How it started

Changing your position on how things are done in early childhood settings can be a tricky task, especially when we are so used to doing things in a certain way.

At Mother Duck, we were aware that children, educators, and families needed time to adapt to doing things differently, so we began with something that everyone was familiar with and could relate to – mealtimes. We looked at our existing practices around mealtimes; we sought appropriate research to support us; and we listened carefully to each other as we thought about ‘doing differently’. We wanted children to develop a positive relationship with food, become active participants in mealtimes and, offer a mealtime experience that was calm, thoughtful, and offer enough time to be enjoyable.

What we found though our critical reflection was that our mealtimes were rushed, noisy, messy, and appeared to be a task that need to be done as quickly as possible. We asked ourselves how we might slow down this whole experience, so that children learned to be part of the entire process. We wanted children to be able to know and express when they were feeling hungry and to make a choice (within a window of time) when they were ready to eat. We wanted them to be part of setting up the meal spaces, to serve their own food from platters, pour their own water from jugs into glasses, to engage in conversations with friends and educators and, to be responsible for cleaning up after themselves – and we hoped to offer these practices from our Infant Studios through to our Kindergarten Studios.

What we see now, nine years after we changed our way of approaching mealtimes, is that children have developed a high sense of autonomy; that they are more in-tune with their bodies and the feelings of being hungry and being satisfied; that there is plenty of time to enjoy a meal with friends, but also that they have responsibilities connected to everyday life such as setting the table and clearing up after themselves. These are life skills that we hope children take with them into the future.

How it is going now

Once our teams experienced the success and benefits of slowing down mealtimes, we started to look at other parts of our curriculum – in particular how we documented our planning to support children’s purposeful play. In 2020 we initiated what we call “planning for the possible” so we could take a longer view of children’s learning and development, where they were offered the time to think, build theories and connections with the world around them. We also explored, as an organisation, what we believed were important skill sets for children to learn, and this is where our inquiry into social responsibility began – Play as a vehicle for understanding, practicing, and enacting social responsibility.

Again, we spent time critically reflecting on our planning for teaching and learning, and discovered how much time was taken away from working alongside children and our colleagues because we were off by ourselves ‘busy’ planning for daily activities – thinking that children needed different things to do every day and that families needed ‘happy snaps’ of their children every day. We found that so much unproductive time was being used in these tasks, so we asked ourselves how we could reconfigure time in order to slow down, be present as teachers and learners, offer children opportunities to dig deep into their ideas and for strong relationships to be built among children and with the materials and resources they used in play. And, of course, we wanted families to be beside us as we made these significant changes.

We now see extraordinary playscapes appearing that are added to over days and weeks. We see children actively seeking solutions to problems such as looking after our environment by not using commercially produced paint. We see children – even very young children – collaborating with others to plan for their play. We see educators engaging in dialogue and debate within teams to ensure they listen to children carefully in order to continue to extend their thinking and ideas.

As an organisation, our slow time has enabled us to share our innovative work with the broader early childhood community through our Exhibitions in 2023 and 2024. Those who visit the Exhibitions can follow our timeline as our work unfolds over a year, demonstrating that working with and alongside children, and each other, is enhanced enormously by slowing down. We have been able to highlight some astonishing evidence of the achievements children have been able to show us when given the time, space, materials and resources to really sit with ideas over days and weeks, even months in some cases.

For example, learning how to work with big builds, to sew, draw, embroider and to work with delicate materials over two years has offered children the opportunity to now work in sophisticated ways – including documenting, or creating, memories of their own learning, as we witnessed in the Exhibition. But the progress continues post Exhibition as the children who have been offered the time to learn how to draw effectively in order to plan and sketch a design for a gown, even slowing down the process further by experimenting with natural dyes colour the fabric, the make intricate bows and butterflies to decorate the gown.

This is truly extraordinary work that celebrates what is possible when we ask, “What is the best use of children’s time today?”

Please reach out to your centre’s Pedagogical Coordinator if you would like more information on our curriculum and how we can help you be assured of your child’s learning and development outcomes and achievements.