Attention and the Visual in the Classroom
My Current Listening Habits
I offer this series of posts as a way of thinking through what I’m doing in class this semester after what I painfully learned last semester. I’m not trying to box in these students, but unbox them in a way. The pandemic, and its educational requirements boxed them in pretty well and not just figuratively. Zoom classroom is very boxy and has given rise to some assumptions and practices that have to be recognized. I have a very short list here of some things I’ve identified but it is not meant to be exhaustive or universally descriptive of all students.
This is just one post of about 4 or 5 I’m thinking about. Here’s the full list of what’s coming:
Visual Stimulation is Required
Students expect completion equals quality
Interaction in class is unnecessary
Class is a solo experience
This post is on the first one, about the role of visual stimulation.
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Argument 1: Students need a lot of visual stimulation
One of the mistakes we make as professors is thinking that our title, status, and deep understanding of a field is enough to garner and capture attention from our students. We don’t feel that it is necessary or even appropriate to try to make the subject matter more accessible and interesting for students, particularly in the required classes that are often called the “general ed” or “core” courses that, theoretically, are meant to help all students get on the same page or starting point for the rest of their university work.
Rhetoric holds as a central and primary principle that the speaker needs to work to both prepare the audience for what they are about to speak about and also show them the value of it to get and keep their interest. One of the ways of doing this is to figure out what the audience already finds valuable and important. Once you understand these assumptions, you can work to link what you want them to believe – the changes in feeling and thought that you want to have happen – to things they already hold as good and valuable.
One of the things the lockdown provided students was the ability to look at multiple visual stimulus at the same time they were in class. On Zoom you can easily open other windows and be engaged in other things while listening in class. This creates an ecology – or a system – of attention and engagement that students came to rely on during the pandemic that is obviously not going to appear appropriate or work well in the traditional classroom.
Perhaps the classroom projector, smartboard, or other video source could be used in this way, to show background video without sound to keep attention while listening? Tik Tok offers these videos now as a form of attention keeping where the split screen shows something unrelated happening that is somewhat interesting while listening to someone speak on the other half.
Mirroring the digital environment they are used to – the old rhetorical strategy of mimesis, is thought of by those invested in “Truth” and “Fact” and “really real” things as an unethical and inappropriate discount. From the sophistic perspective, it’s the only way to get buy-in on the issues that matter – comfort and familiarity are as important, if not more so, than information and research. Perhaps we could go as far to say they make those latter two categories identifiable.
Fidelity to the students before you rather than fidelity to some standard of purity of the field, or purity of information – or even the idea that I’ve heard professors say that students should adapt to what professors do because they are so lucky to be in college – are all failing propositions if you really do want to educate people.