A series on how to help our students strengthen their abilities to pay attention to their lives, the world, and their vocations.
In a 2022 Atlantic article about Fred Rogers, Adelia Moore recounts her experience in the 1970s as a one-time guest on an episode of his television show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and her subsequent friendship with him. In addition to his “gentleness, kindness, and empathy,” she describes the most magnetic and distinctive part of Mr. Rogers’ persona as his attentiveness, claiming that the character trait that made him such a powerful figure was “his capacity to pay attention.” This capacity, she laments, has become increasingly rare in today’s world.
Attention as a necessary and threatened resource has been on the minds of many (if not all) of us in higher education for a long time, especially those of us who think about undergraduate education in vocational terms. For obvious reasons, that concern intensified during and after the pandemic: on this blog in 2021, Jason Stevens argued that attention may be the resource most under threat in our current moment. In the last decade, several books—by authors like Tim Wu, Jenny Odell, and Chris Hayes—attest to this ongoing and worsening threat. Jonathan Haidt, author of the widely read The Anxious Generation, has recently said that he increasingly sees the assault on children’s attention as on par with the mental health consequences he attributes to children’s smartphone use.
My contention is that, in order to help students develop their attentive faculties, we must not only help them see the problem clearly (which so many of them are already acutely aware of); we also need to give them active ways of reclaiming and strengthening their capacity for sustained focus. One way to do that is to name the classroom an attention gym—a space where a key goal is to develop the muscles we need to become more attentive people.
To frame the work of learning as the work of attention is to draw our students into a metaphor for learning as a kind of workout for the self. The classroom, if framed and marked as such, becomes an active space for stretching, exercising, and strengthening our attentive faculties. These are faculties that, according to Scott Mattingly (building on the important vocational insights of Willie James Jennings and Paul Wadell and Charles Pinches), constitute “the foundations of every vocational journey.”
This framing also builds on the work of thinkers like Cal Newport, who has, for more than a decade now, been describing our collective declining “cognitive fitness.” In a recent op-ed, Newport compares our relationships to digital technologies to our cultural understanding of nutrition and physical fitness, which has undergone a dramatic shift in a relatively short period of time. More people exercise and understand the dangers of regularly consuming processed food, he argues, because over time, people and communities changed their behavior in response to the spread of new knowledge. He suggests our relationship to technology could undergo a similar overhaul.
In college classrooms, we have a unique opportunity to create the conditions for such an overhaul and to design learning spaces where people interact with one another in deliberately different ways than they might experience in other places. For example, in Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age, Felicia Wu Song describes what she calls the “Freedom Project”: a series of assignments that help students experiment with their own digital habits and reflect on them.
My experiments with these kinds of assignments in my classes suggest that undergraduate students are aware of, and often distressed by, the ways they feel shortchanged by the digital environment. In describing the impact of digital technology on their learning, students often express frustration, sometimes despair, about the ways they see that their attentiveness has been fractured by always having smartphones in their pockets and classroom environments marked by regular laptop use.
In a unit on vocation and formation, I often have my first-year writing students read Moore’s Atlantic article and watch Mister Rogers in action in the episode, admiring the handsewn animals and quilts Moore shows him in her home studio. After reading Wadell and Pinches’s chapter on attention as a virtue that is essential for “living vocationally,” I ask students to write reflectively in response to these questions:
- How do you become an attentive person?
- What are the barriers to developing your capacity for attention?
- As a college student, what might help you to strengthen this capacity?
Giving my students space to examine how their attentive capacities have been formed by daily routines and habits helps them examine the patterns they are developing as new college students. It also helps them be intentional about choosing the rituals that will support their growth in the directions they deem valuable.
This assignment also gives me the opportunity to show students that the habits and routines of the writing classroom—if they will embrace them—can re-form their attention. Naming the labor of academics as a kind of workout orients them to thinking not only in terms of what they are learning (content) but also in formational terms, attuning them to how they are learning it (process).
Our key question for this unit: If you are summoned here to be a student, how might going to class, reading and studying, writing papers and taking exams—the stuff of a student’s vocation—cultivate in you particular dispositions that then become default parts of your character? Put another way, how might these exercises strengthen and stretch the muscles you will need for listening well, discerning the best path forward, and living with intention?
Wadell and Pinches help me make the case that those muscles are exactly the ones they will need for vocational discernment. In the chapter I assign, they refer to attentiveness as one of three “situating virtues” that “root us in a time and place” and remind “us of who we really are.” More specifically: attentiveness, they write, teaches us “to see and to act according to what is real … to be attuned … to the world in which we find ourselves.” To work at developing this virtue is to grow in the ability to notice and to act in response to what is important—key skills for vocational exploration and decision-making.
Such skills develop as students live in response to their immediate learning environment, forming them as people who “not only … show up for class, but also [are] actively engaged with it,” people who “approach it with the openness and intellectual humility.” Wadell and Pinches write that attentiveness “requires me not to sleepwalk through life … but to be conscious of the time and place in which I find myself now, and especially conscious of the people who make up my life each day.”
This kind of conscious, intentional presence is hard-won in our fractured, digitized, input-saturated culture—and our students know it. Building in opportunities for them to name and practice that kind of presence is both a helpful means (motivating them to see the work of the classroom as working on them at a deeper level) and a valuable end (forming in them ways of being awake to the world that they can continue to nurture).
In classes where vocational thinking is woven into the pedagogy, this metaphor of the attention gym can give us a concrete way to convey to students what they can gain by showing up each day and putting in the work. It can also call us to be deliberate and thoughtful about what we are asking students to do with the precious resource of their attention—and to ask whether we are stewarding it well.
Jennifer Ellis West is associate professor of English and director of core writing at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, where she teaches first-year and upper-level writing courses and leads a lively community of fellow writing teachers. She is the co-author of The Dialogic Classroom in Higher Education: Revolutionary Listening for Curiosity, Engagement, and Deep Listening. An academic associate for Essential Partners, she is also a NetVUE faculty fellow and participated in the 2026 NetVUE Writing Colloquy.