B&C describe "temporal contexts" of transfer thusly:
This dimension reflects the elapsed time between training and testing phases (e.g., a few minutes, a week, or years later). … to justify the effort invested in education, ideally one would hope for transfer to last for several years after training.
But what does it mean for me to argue that a different time is invoked during class? And not just invoked (like, "yesterday I was thinking about this...") but consequentially invoked - so that the time itself is relevant?
What I want to argue is that our evolving narratives - the story we can tell of the construction of our scientific ideas - hopscotch across time. And part of this is because our ideas are iterative - we develop, challenge, build, critique and abandon ideas over months of instruction. - We do not finish the day's lab and turn our attentions to new ideas, or treat those day's ideas as 'settled.' We don't have a book that tells us "this is how to understand this idea." (And the book might build on but does not modify that idea.) And since we are never "done" with an idea, it keeps us on the edge of our questions. So I think what I mean is that other times are positioned as 'continuous' with our current narrative... does that make sense? ... that (a) there is an evolving narrative - forward and backward looking (unlike a textbook that builds from right-idea to right-idea) and (b) other, new elements to our story can show up at any time (and any place - which I establish in other 'context' stories). It's a little like a book we can open and close (and never ends!). When we open it, we "pick up" the story from a few hours or days ago to thread together discontinuous times into a continuous one. (This reminds me of Flat Stanley how carrying him around meant sometimes I would be pulled into "seeing" like a 6-year-old boy for a moment.) So the "temporal" contexts are relevant / consequential to our evolving narrative because it frames our activity in a particular way and promotes/builds on our iteration in a way that makes the other contexts possible. (? do i buy this ?)
Examples: Maddy completes a lab while in Walgreens. Andy answers his wife's questions during classtime. Wendi extends her critique of primary colors at home. Our "seconds" theory in class is later dismantled by the "koosh" theory (an example of backwards-looking revision).
G&W describe similarity as a tesseract:
"Our hope, then, is not to have students transfer by connecting remotely related situations, but rather to have students warp their psychological spaces so that formerly remote situations are similar."
I would reword this to say, of time:
"Our hope, then, is not to have students transfer across time by connecting a distant idea to a current situation, but rather to position a current situation as a continuation of prior classroom situations; that is, to warp psychological time so that otherwise remote times are seen as continuous."And, I think, this is fostered by those prior situations being viewed as never-quite-finished, open, always, to revision.
