As different versions of artificial intelligence become pervasive in higher education, those of us who teach composition, writing or the humanities need to insist on something we have always known: these courses are about the process of learning, not the end product (the final paper or research essay).
Here, I’ll outline a way of reconfiguring composition and writing classes as “practices of attention” to language, and to the metacognitive experience of reading and writing.
Practices of attention as pedagogical method
Everyone who is taking their teaching seriously, it seems to me, is aware of the challenge that the attention economy poses to students today. There is despair, but there is also inspiring, innovative pedagogy.
Here are a few examples of the latter: Tisha Turk, at Grinnell College, has a beautiful post called “Writing centers as attention technology”, in which she describes a process that allows students to attend to their writing and themselves, and she includes an important primer on neurodivergent students’ ways of understanding and learning.
David Landes offers his students a “menu of attentions”, from which they can experience different kinds of attention in varying situations, and give each other writing prompts. He says: “Through this assignment, students are positioned as teachers of new attentions,” an empowering way of confronting the problem of monetised distraction and turning it into a peer-to-peer learning opportunity.
A trio of professors in Brazil address what they call the merging of “writing problems and attention practices” by focusing their writing practices on care. Attention “depends on rituals to promote care and refuge”, they write, which accords with an idea a colleague and I worked on: the classroom as a sanctuary of attention.
You might find yourself nodding along in agreement with these ideas. But how might you implement something like these processes, assignments and attention practices in the classroom?
A protocol of attention in four steps
The Strother School of Radical Attention (SoRA) in Brooklyn, NY, with which I am affiliated, is an experimental community of attention activists. A group of us began, years ago, doing attention labs with anyone who wanted to join us, for free, in some public place. As the technology of the attention economy became more powerful and more pervasive, this evolved into a pedagogical method that we introduced into seminars and workshops at SoRA, and which a number of other teachers and I now employ in our home institutions.
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A practice of attention is a private experiment in being. We call them attention labs because they are opportunities to use your attention, or a few types of your ever-expanding set of attentions, to see what you can make of it, in a controlled experiment. A practice of attention is not always or necessarily an academic exercise; it is a way of reflecting on one’s intellectual and emotional being, first alone and then together in a group of participants.
My colleague, sociology professor Kristin Lawler, and I designed a four-step practice of attention called “How to read (a poem)” for our students at the University of Mount Saint Vincent. We hand out a poem or another short text, and we ask the students to spend a certain number of minutes thinking and writing privately on each of these prompts. I like to ring a little chime to signal the end of each phase; not speaking helps to preserve the atmosphere of concentration. Here is the protocol:
1. Read the poem. What are your first impressions? Is the poem long, short, hard, easy, relevant, boring, engaging, beautiful, confusing? Does it make you feel a specific way? (three minutes)
2. Read the poem again, slowly and carefully. Underline and annotate. See if any of the following questions help you understand the poem better.
- What happens in this poem?
- Where does the poem take place?
- What do we know about the speaker?
- Does this poem remind you of other poems you’ve read? (six minutes)
3. What is the opposite of this poem? Whatever you think you understood in the previous step, let that go. What is this poem not? (four minutes)
4. Return to the poem as it is, and consider it again. What is it like to reflect on this poem in different ways? What might you keep thinking about when the bell rings and you turn away from the poem? (four minutes).
This is only one protocol for a practice of attention, but it has some typical features. First, it requires the student to read the text – which could be a poem or prose or a maths problem or, with some changes, a slide of a cell from a leaf – multiple times and to consider the same text from different perspectives.
This is critical. In my experience, it is easier to get students to reread something by presenting them with a protocol like this, which varies their approach, than it is to require them to reread the same thing without radically varying the set of questions.
The protocol also requires each student to write privately as they reflect on the prompts. I have them use a notebook and a pen for this. After the final phase, students are put in pairs or small groups to share the results of their experiment in a structured conversation, phase by phase. I usually sit in on multiple groups.
It is crucial to give students a protocol with at least two prompts. That way, the students can continue to reflect on the given text, without being told that they have failed when their attention wandered. Of course it wandered! A protocol is designed to bring one’s attention back to a single text or object by offering different, related ways of focusing on the same thing. These elements can be combined to create practices of attention for any academic subject, I believe.
Steal this book, if you haven’t already
This pedagogical strategy has multiple benefits. A practice of attention in the classroom combines three kinds of student learning activities: silent reflection, writing and conversation.
Teaching writing or any humanities class as a series of practices of attention centres peer-to-peer education. It is less hierarchical than a class in which you, the professor, dominate the discussion, even when you are continually asking questions. As students become familiar with them, they can be asked to design practices of attention of their own, which can increase their sense of agency over their learning process.
Finally, teaching literature and writing through practices of attention is by no means to diminish the potential for students to learn how to read and write better. It may be the best way of teaching critical thinking and close reading in the attention economy.
As artificial intelligence technologies continue to pervade our institutions, we need to refocus our classes on the processes of learning and not the final products we (used to) require.
Leonard Nalencz is associate professor of English at the University of Mount Saint Vincent and a faculty member at the Strother School of Radical Attention.
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