Session Information
13 SES 09 B, Attention and Virtue
Paper Session
Contribution
“Pay Attention!” What educational significance can be read into this phrase? It can either work as an intervention, by which a teacher asserts him- or herself as the epicenter of the classroom or it can work as an invitation, by encouraging the students to take part in coming or on-going educational activities. The phrase gains from the latter perspective a twofold meaning; on one hand it is pointing towards something – an object, an idea or an event – and on the other hand it is directed towards the one who should attend to this “something”. It can therefore be seen as an invitation to someone to become an attentive subject. From an educational perspective, attention is connected to the act of showing and as such it has relational dimension, regarding the one who is showing, the one who is shown and the object (whether in the form of a thing, an action or a concept) being shown. The German educational thinker Dietrich Benner (2003) has stated that any theory of education is incomplete if it does not take into consideration both of the principles of Bildsamkeit and the principle of Aufforderung zur Selbsttätigkeit. The former principle can be said to concern the possibilities and limits of educational aims and purposes whereas the latter concerns the possibility of the very existence of education itself (Uljens 2001). The phrase “Pay attention!”, or any other gesture calling for attention, could therefore be seen as certain forms of Aufforderung Zur Selbsttätigkeit, in a sense that they invite or summons a person to engage in a transformative relation. The actual “paying attention” would then be to pursue this relation and thus explore one’s Bildsamkeit.
While more and more voices from the psychological and cognitive sciences have called for a more general conception of what it actually means to be attentive, this paper addresses the link between education and attention in putting forth educational relations as specific realms of attention formation. Now, if one assumes that the forming and fostering of attention is an integral part of education and that education is a highly relational activity, attention cannot be understood only as a fixed entity that students or children either have or can acquire, but must be thought of as a qualitative characteristic of the relation itself. “Pay attention!” can instead be seen as a calling the subject into presence (i.e. self-presence), constituting a subject with its own history and future. More specifically; imperative and intentional actions that in different ways call for attention can be seen as activities that call the subject into its own subjectivity, i.e. they enable the becoming of attentive subjects.
In the paper I intend to explore the formation of attention as a significant characteristic of educational relations. The task is to show how attention can be understood from the intergenerational and interpersonal traits of education itself. This will be done through a discussion where the two principles Aufforderung zur Selbsttätigkeit and Bildsamkeit will be explored in relation to a notion of education as attention formation. By investigating the relation between both principles the paper further explores how Benner’s claim will affect the way attention is understood in discussions concerning educational relations.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Arvidson, S. P. (2006). The Sphere of Attention. Context and Margin. USA: Springer. Benner, D. (2003). On the impossibility of understanding education solely in reference to the concept of a 'summons to self-activity'. A reply to Alfred Langewand. In Zeitschrift fur Pädagogik, 49(2), pp. 290-304. Herbart, J. F. (1908). The Science of education: Its General Principles Deduced From its Aim and The Aesthetic Revelation of the World. Boston: D.C. Heath and CO., Publishers. Ingold, T. (2001). From Transmissions of Representations to the Education of Attention. In H.Whitehouse (ed.) “The Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology versus Ethnography”, pp. 113-153, London: Berg. Mole, Christopher. (2011). Attention is Cognitive Unison. An Essay in Philosophical Psychology. Oxford University Press: 2011. Parasuraman, R. (ed.) (2000). The Attentive Brain. USA: The MIT Press. Toren, C. (2001). The child in mind. In H.Whitehouse (ed.) “The Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology versus Ethnography”, pp. 155-179, London: Berg. Sobe, N. W (2004). Challenging the Gaze: The Subject of Attention in a 1915 Montessori Demonstration Classroom. Educational Theory. 54(3), pp. 280-297. Uljens, M. (2001). Om hur människan blir människa bland människor. Om intersubjektivitet och pedagogik. Utbildning & demokrati. 10(3), pp. 85-102.
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