Pay Attention

Pay attention.

I am troubled (again! again!) by this insidiously tiny full sentence. 

It intrigues me, this idea that we must transact in attention, give it away in exchange for something asked or demanded of us. It intrigues me that it nearly invisibly uses the language of money and commerce: pay attention. As though it were a debt held above a child’s head.

In a classroom, just last week, I heard an educator ask demand that a group of three-year-olds “pay attention” during a circle time. The children were being asked to count to twenty, aloud, and in unison. There was a growl in the educator’s voice as she made her demand, an edge of exhaustion raising hackles I know so well. There is a physicality that can seep into an exhausted, overworked, underpaid and undervalued early childhood educator that I have the utmost empathy for; I have been her too. I reach for Ann Pelo and Margie Carter reminding me that “When we engage educators as we hope they engage children, we see them as capable participants in the project of inquiry […]” (2018, p. 126). So, again I must muse about what we mean by pay attention. It is not a neutral request, indeed we are asking children to give us the (arguably) deepest agentic capability of all, to choose where to place our attention. “Through attention, I gain my freedom, my emancipation, and my power to act” (Ramsay-Levi, 2023, p. 15). 

Your thoughts?
How might we value attention outside of systems in which it is “owed” to us as educators?  

What could be possible if we viewed attention as the utmost privilege and obligation within our classrooms?

About the author
Catherine-Laura Dunnington holds an ECE III license in both Manitoba and Nova Scotia and has been privileged to work in early childhood classrooms across North America. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Developmental Studies at the University of Winnipeg, on Treaty One Territory. 

References

Pelo, A., & Carter, M. (2018). From teaching to thinking: A pedagogy for reimagining our work. Exchange Press. 

Ramsay-Levi, N. (2023). Rule 1. In New rules next week: Corita Kent’s legacy through the eyes of twenty artists and writers (pp. 12-15).  Chronicle Books. 

Photo Credit: Catherine-Laura Dunnington