Learning in one place at a time: a personal perspective on block teaching, neurodiversity, and belonging in Foundation education

Block and intensive teaching models are often evaluated through metrics of efficiency, satisfaction, or performance. This paper examines curriculum structures as pedagogical and ethical configurations of time, shaping cognitive load, belonging, and the lived experience of learning within Foundation (Year 0) education.<br/><br/>Framed by neurodiversity-informed, critical disability, and ethics-of-care perspectives, the study adopts a practitioner inquiry approach, drawing on reflective comparative analysis of block and concurrent module delivery within a UK Foundation programme. Grounded in my positionality as a dyslexic educator with hyperacusis, it considers how temporal organisation distributes cognitive pressure, structures relational proximity, and encodes assumptions about the learner. The analysis suggests that curriculum design is not merely administrative but ethically consequential. In this context, block teaching functions as a form of structural inclusion by reducing fragmentation and supporting cognitive containment during transition into higher education.<br/><br/>The paper contributes to scholarship on block and intensive learning by reframing timetabling as pedagogical infrastructure and by positioning lived neurodivergent experience as a legitimate analytic lens. Rather than advocating block delivery as universally superior, it argues that temporal coherence can act as an inclusive scaffold, particularly within Foundation contexts where belonging and academic identity are still emerging.