Lecture and workshop ask what it means to pay attention

A student can sit through a class, take notes, answer a question and still have a part of their mind somewhere else. A message waits. A feed refreshes. Another thought never gets the quiet it needs to become an idea.

Kristin Lawler, a Sociology professor at the University of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx, N.Y., and a faculty member of the Strother School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn, came to Guilford on September 25 with a question that reaches beyond putting phones away: What kind of education is possible when our attention is always being called elsewhere?

During a lecture in Founders Hall titled “Attention and Care in Higher Education,” Kristin argued that the ability to think deeply depends on something colleges do not always name when they talk about learning.

Care.

“We want students to care because then they can think,” she told an audience of faculty and staff.

Kristin described an economy built around keeping people on their devices. Every pause becomes an opening for another notification, video or invitation to scroll. The longer we stay, she said, the better the technology becomes at holding us there.

Her concern was not simply that students might miss a few minutes of a lecture. It was that a constant stream of stimulation can make it harder to stay with a difficult question, another person or even the world outside the screen.

Consider the feed, she said: a cat video, news of a genocide, a celebrity’s shoes. They appear in the same stream, one after another. We feel something, perhaps intensely, and then the next image arrives. Eventually, Kristin argued, the rush can leave people both overstimulated and strangely indifferent.

When our capacity to care is dulled, she said, our capacity to think is dulled, too.

That gives the liberal arts a role beyond preparing students for work. Reading a novel slowly, testing a scientific idea, considering a work of art or listening long enough to understand someone else asks students to pay attention in different ways. Those experiences may change what they know. They may also change who they become.

“Students don’t just focus on one thing and pay attention to one thing,” Kristin said. “We cultivate the whole person.”

After the lecture, many students, faculty and staff joined a workshop in the Moon Room at Dana Auditorium. The gathering was part of Guilford’s larger effort to help students reclaim their attention and explore how the College can teach it more intentionally.

Guilford is partnering with Friends of Attention to bring practices of attention into teaching and learning. The partnership will continue over the coming months as faculty consider incorporating these practices into their classes.

Nothing to submit. Nothing to swipe. Just time to notice and remain with something.

Guilford has a history to draw on. Its Quaker tradition values silence, listening and discernment. Students and professors have gathered in circles and sat through moments of quiet long before a phone could fill every spare second. The College’s work now is to make those practices useful to a generation living with social media and artificial intelligence.

Kristin suggested that reclaiming attention is something people frequently already do together. She pointed to bird watchers, musicians, surfers and skateboarders — people absorbed in an activity and in one another’s company. Asked about surfing after the lecture, she noted that much of it involves waiting. Skateboarding, she said, can turn ordinary city spaces into places for play and collective joy.

There is no efficiency in watching for a wave. There is no assignment to turn in after hearing the wind move through the Quad.

But there may be the beginning of an education in learning to stay long enough to notice.