For decades, the concept of attention occupied a prominent if ill-defined role within the American classroom. Above all, ‘attention’ was seen through the lens of student discipline: students who ‘had’ attention could ‘pay’ it, and thereby follow the teacher’s instructions, while students who struggled with behavior were said to have a ‘deficit‘ of attention.

This situation has changed dramatically in the last twenty years. The proliferation of technologies for capturing, measuring, and monetizing attention has led to the creation of a new education technology (‘EdTech’) industry which is fundamentally transforming the ways in which student attention is managed and engaged in the classroom.

The Learning Industry will explore the various ways in which educators, scientists and technologists have sought to act upon student attention within classrooms— to cultivate, focus, capture, redirect, routinize, automate, gamify, condition, immerse, and supplement attention for educational ends. We will touch on key moments in the history of attention within pedagogical theory and practice; explore different conceptions of the role of attention within education; and imagine EdTech’s classroom of the future—a classroom characterized by gamification, XR, and artificial intelligence.

Finally—and most importantly— we will consider a range of alternative pedagogies which do not seek to capture or instrumentalize student attention, but which rather pursue, as their ultimate aim, the formation or emancipation of student attention as such.

Taught by Jac Mullen, writer, teacher and former Executive Editor of The American Reader.