Discussion
Attending to attentionality
"Attention is the fundamental building block of how humans think," Rheingold says. Targeting attention as a literacy skill, categorizing kinds of attention, explicit teaching of attention—these are compelling ideas, especially as classroom teachers work to help their students understand comprehension.
If attention is where comprehension begins—and in a 6-stage developmental model of visual literacy I've been working on, motivation or "willingness to look," is the lowest level—then I am eager to read more about it and hear what others are thinking about this topic.
This is a very useful collection.
Thank you, Elyse.
Susan
Comments
Elyse Eidman-Aadahl
on Nov 01 2010
at 19:46
Say more about your model
This is interesting Susan -- I'd like to hear more about the six step model and this 'willing to look' as the foundational move. It feels huge. I'm thinking of all those young people with their first reaction of dismissal: "this is so stupid." What leads to a willingness to look long enough, deeply enough, to develop the interest that leads to more looking?
Joyce Sheehey
on Nov 06 2010
at 08:39
Attending Attention
This seems particularly relevant now with the recent book by Nicholas Carr (The Shallows), also the writer of the piece "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" -- his claim is that we are being distracted to death and can no longer give complicated things (like reading) the attention they require. I really like the idea of attention as a literacy skill.
Elyse Eidman-Aadahl
on Nov 06 2010
at 09:50
Carr and Colbert
Hi Joyce,
What did you think of the Carr book? On the "Is Google Making Us Stupid" page of the larger collection I put links to some funny videos where Carr visits Colbert, who can't pay attention to him because he is too distracted. :-) If you didn't see then, they're in this collection: http://digitalis.nwp.org/collection/its-end-world-we-know-it-and-i-feel-....
Joyce Sheehey
on Nov 06 2010
at 13:37
Google and The Shallows
Hi Elyse,
I haven't read Carr's book yet (just the article, which I gave my students when the school year began). I wanted to have this discussion before we started the difficult reading of "Early American Classics". Here's what Iheard from my kids, overall: "We can pay attention to many things. We are multi-taskers. You need not worry about our changing brains, our capabilites. We can sit down to read with our cell phones nearby, proceed to read Hawthorne, respond to a text message, and easily return to what we were reading." The average 17/18-year-old in my classroom rejected Carr, but I remain unconvinced by their dismissive response. And I LOVED the posting you provided of Carr on The Colbert Report ... funny ... I'll show that to my students.
Kim Jaxon
on Nov 21 2010
at 09:56
rethinking attention
Hi Elyse, Susan and others,
I like this response by HASTAC's Cathy Davidson. She, and others, and trying to push against the commonplace arguments about attention (and the myth of the literacy crisis) by pointing out that we "blur the distinctions between 'distraction' and 'attention.'" Not being able to pay attention in school may have more to do with school than the student.
http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/why-doesnt-anyone-pay-attenti...
Just anecdotally, I hang out with a lot of teenagers and young adults (with my family and as someone who works with first year students). I'm not seeing first hand evidence of the problems with attention. My own kids and my college students read, they read thoughtfully, they can put away the phones, and sometimes we have laptops, phones, and readings all working together to understand a difficult reading. I wonder if people are reacting to social norms? Like the annoyance of someone texting while you're talking to them. But this is just rude and may not have anything to do with the inability to stay focused. Did we have the same debates with phones first became ubiquitous in homes? Was it rude to take a call when you were talking to someone at your house? Did it appear that you couldn't pay attention?
Thanks Elyse for the provocative set of readings and thanks Susan for the conversation!
Kim
margaret fiore
on Nov 27 2010
at 11:40
attention
I often think of teaching writing as including this sequence of goals (which I no doubt absorbed from someone like Elbow and can no longer explicitly credit)--helping writers develop willingness, and willingness to write helps writers build stamina, and with willingness and increasing stamina, writers can build fluency. The sequence makes sense also for reading, so probably also attention.
Margaret
Elyse Eidman-Aadahl
on Nov 27 2010
at 12:50
I like the idea of 'stamina'
Thanks for this post, Margaret. I love the idea of bringing in the notions of willingness and stamina.
One of the things that intrigues me about the overall discussion of attention and focus is the tension I feel, personally, between rejection of the alarmist commentary on the one hand (symbolized by Carr or the recent NYT Wired for Distraction piece) and the idea that focusing attention is something that is learned and can be cultivated (symbolized by Rheingold). I don't see that any of it as necessarily true only of digital environments -- as opposed to industrial environments, crowded environments, chaotic environments, or even the standard "blooming buzzing confusion" that every infant goes through. So Kim's post, which rejects the alarmist views, resonates with me.
But on the other hand, I find I am intrigued with the notion of making attention, focus, etc. something to talk about and think about and cultivate in ourselves and our students. I like thinking of it as a kind of stamina that can be developed and put to work. Maybe it is like 'flow'. Maybe it required a willingness to experience engagement. All of that sounds like something the person must develop for him/herself.
Schools strike me as environments that are not conducive to developing this capacity. They are places where we are almost always in large groups, changing activities every few minutes, rarely allowed to actually stay with anything for any period of time. And I think this is getting worse in many places as we lose minutes that would have gone to 'co-curricular pursuits' like art or attention-requiring activities like video/audio editing. Even things like DEAR (Drop Everything And Read) programs which provide routine settings where you can get better at actually spending a full 20 or 30 minutes quietly reading are being generally pushed out of the school day so that we can spend those 20 minutes in directed, testable activities.
So if digital environments continue the longstanding trend of creating environments that are full of distractions, and if current digital culture finds 'continuous partial attention' an acceptable state of affairs, then the capacity to focus attention, self-regulate, reflect, etc. will continue to be among the high value personal skills that we don't think or talk about as curricular goals. Your post points to that nicely.
margaret fiore
on Nov 28 2010
at 09:37
attention ...
Thanks, Elyse, for your rich reply.
Two more thoughts arise for me--the issue of patience and the issue of self-regulation. As a college writing teacher and writing consultant with high school teachers, I meet and work with hs and college students who still--all these years after the '66 Dartmouth conference and founding of the NWP!--"never heard of" taking a piece of writing through a drafting process. Or even simply "rewriting"! Last summer a transfer student from Bennington, a photography and art major who told me he'd been told for years he wasn't a good writer but not clearly enough what to do about it, wrote at the end of the semester, after five multi-draft assignments, he'd never before experienced the benefit of spending time with a draft or understood how long it can take to produce a strong piece of writing. However, he'd spent intensive flow-time shooting photos and developing and manipulating them as well as making his other-media art. For writing, he claimed he'd never experienced applying that patience (and thus was on probation because of his writing). High school teachers with whom I consult are sometimes hesitant (often wisely) to stay with a writing assignment, believing students don't have the patience (or stamina) to continue to invest in it.
Revising and editing do take patience, even for me. I call to mind my experience of making teak deck furniture from a kit (and without carpentry skills)--the only way I could afford it. The salesman said each adirondack chair kit would take about 2-3 hours. Each took me 9 hours. What enabled me to persist? Desiring the end result for my investment, no doubt. But I wonder if I learned patience from school experiences like home ec in 10th grade, where we had sewing and I learned to make a skirt or blouse from a pattern--starting with pieces, moving toward a whole. Sometimes sewing a lining or zipper on the outside and having to rip it out and re-do it. I might have had the same experience had I had the choice of woodworking or even photography, but I didn't. My brother had years of art classes at the Art Institute of Chgo in addition to art in school, and in his life undertook many patience-requiring projects. Are children who don't have such hands-on experiences losing valuable opportunities to learn patience?
The other issue, self-regulation, has been in the news recently as a factor in children's success in school--I can't remember specific citations, but I think in multiple places. How do children learn self-regulation?
Both patience and self-regulation seem important.
Margaret
Greg Graham
on Feb 01 2011
at 13:04
Attention as a literacy skill
I'm jumping into this conversation late, but thought I would share anyway.
Targeting attention was a major focus of my Master's thesis. I teach first-year writing, and the topic of attention informs my pedagogy, as well as a bit of content from time-to-time. I have found that students are very interested in talking about their constant state of distraction, so I work it in through any number of creative means. The great majority of them recognize a lack of what I call "single-tasking" in their lives. Many of them see it as no big deal, but some are hungry for the tools to do something about it.
As Margaret pointed out in her above post, the writing process is a perfect tool for instilling the kind of focus we want for our students (and ourselves). Equipping them in the writing process (as well as self-narrative, I believe, but that is another topic) is strengthening their attentional skills. As a matter of fact, rather than speak of "attention as a literacy skill," I prefer to think of literacy as an attentional skill.
Elyse Eidman-Aadahl
on Feb 01 2011
at 17:15
Would love to hear more
Thanks for your post, Greg. I'd love to hear more about what you're doing with this in your FYC classes. Perhaps you could contribute a resource at some point? I really think that the management of attention and focus is a very important skill. Of course, it has always been so, but our distraction-filled environments make it even more important.
Reingold is continuing his attention project, and we'll be posting more resources. There are also some more things collected in this collection: http://digitalis.nwp.org/collection/its-end-world-we-know-it-and-i-feel-fine Thanks for sharing.
Greg Graham
on Feb 02 2011
at 11:57
Literacy as an attentional skill
You're welcome Elyse. I've been enjoying this collection for a while now. It's right up my alley. I've been planning to join the conversation, and have been thinking about contributing some resources. So count me in. Let me know how I can participate.
Elyse Eidman-Aadahl
on Feb 02 2011
at 13:33
Becoming a resource creator
Great Greg. We'd very much welcome your contributions. Someone will follow up with you about becoming a resource creator. It's not mysterious...it's just that since the site is so new, it has its ideosyncracies. So it's easiest for someone to walk you through some of it.
Kim Foley
on Sep 26 2012
at 02:56
Thanks a lot for the article!
Thanks a lot for the article! I have always thought that attention was a must for everybody. That's why wile studying I did my best to train my attention and memory. Very interesting post.
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