Slow Pedagogies, Fast World: Allowing the Time for Meaning to Breathe
The room was quiet again. Blocks leaned in half-finished towers, a puzzle lay incomplete, and the faint scent of clay lingered in the air. My body knew the rhythm that should follow: wipe, stack, reset. Yet something made me pause. I hesitated, wondering what stories I might erase by tidying too soon.
That small hesitation stayed with me. In early childhood education, time often moves quickly, measured by transitions, routines, and expectations of readiness. Yet sometimes transformation arises in the pause, in the moment we resist the comfort of what feels familiar and predictable. Haraway (2016) reminds us to stay with the trouble, to dwell in uncertainty long enough for something new to take shape. I began to recognize how that same invitation lived quietly within my own classroom.
As I slowed down to notice what remained in children’s play, I realized that the traces did not require completion; they simply asked for attention. I began to wonder what might unfold if I left some of them untouched, if I let the room remember. The next morning, the children noticed too. One child reached for a small cluster of rocks we had gathered during our nature hunt the day before, usually destined for the loose parts bin. “We picked them [up] in the field yesterday,” she said softly, her fingers tracing their
familiar shapes. Then she began to add to them, layering, arranging, reimagining. Her return wasn’t a repetition; it was a gentle return and a slow continuation of meaning-making.
In those moments, I found myself thinking with Clark’s (2022) idea of slow pedagogy, an unhurried and attentive approach that honours children’s own pace and rhythm. Slowing down, I realized, is not an absence of rhythm but a different kind of movement. It allows imagination to return to what already exists, to deepen rather than to replace.
In a fast world, such pauses can feel uneasy. The habit of tidying, of making things ‘ready’ for learning again, runs deep because it feels like care. Yet I have learned that care can also mean taking mindful pauses and staying patiently with what is still taking shape, allowing a little more time for meaning to breathe.
Sometimes, in the late afternoon light, I still see it: the shimmer that fills the room when everything slows, towers leaning, papers curling, puzzle pieces scattered across the floor, the quiet after play. These moments remind me that teaching, too, can move at a gentler pace, one that reflects, wonders, and waits. In what remains, the unfinished and the overlooked traces of children’s play, we find imagination, meaning-making, and quiet continuation.
Your Thoughts
1. How might slowing down change what you notice in children’s play?
2. In what ways could unhurried moments reshape how you teach, listen, and respond?
About the Author
Amy Mamadaliyeva is a recent graduate of Western University’s Master of Professional Education program and a Level 3 early childhood educator in Alberta. Her pedagogical project explores the traces of children’s play, those messy, unfinished remnants of activity, as invitations for creativity, inquiry, and connection.
References
Clark, A. (2022). Slow knowledge and the unhurried child: Time for slow pedagogies in early childhood education. Routledge.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.