Recent and Forthcoming Writing
This month the Chronicle of Higher Education published the fifth in my six-part series of essays on distraction and attention in education. Timed for the start of the new semester, this most recent essay argues that we should think about our courses as opportunities for our students to retreat from the anxiety and chaos of our pandemic year and focus on learning something meaningful, intriguing, or beautiful. I hope it inspires faculty to renew their commitment to the value of attention in their classrooms, whether they are face-to-face or online or somewhere in between.
The final essay in the series, which will appear in the Chronicle in February, focuses on a question I keep hearing from faculty at the virtual presentations and workshops I have been giving for conferences or other institutions: How can the research on distraction and attention make me more focused and productive in my own work? Although I don’t address that question in the book, I have been thinking a lot about it, and the column will provide three concrete recommendations for cultivating faculty attention during this challenging time, each of which will be drawn from a different book. I hope the column will give readers some new ideas to consider—and some new books to read.
In the meantime, an enterprising student must have been thinking along the same lines, and reflecting upon how the ideas from the book can help inform student study and learning habits. Gabrielle Landry has written a thoughtful blog post on the implications of the book for students, drawing out five lessons for students that run parallel to some of the recommendations for teachers.
I am very excited for a forthcoming essay of mine on Dorothy Day and distraction, which will be published in Commonweal. This essay came as a result of my reading her journals, and discovering that she once planned to take a yearlong retreat from her duties at the Catholic Worker movement to write, think, and pray. But she found that retreats didn’t suit her—her mind was beset by distractions and ultimately she abandoned her retreat and returned to her work serving the poor in New York. I use this story to reflect upon the fact that what we sometimes view as our distractions can be the very things that most deserve our attention.
My major project right now is the second edition of Small Teaching, which I expect to complete in April. I am writing a new preface, updating some of the research and models, and tightening lots of lazy prose along the way. I am also substantively revising and re-naming two chapters: “Self-Explaining” is becoming “Questioning,” and “Growing” is becoming “Belonging.” In both cases the chapter focus is expanding to incorporate the original idea within a larger framework. The growth mindset, which I addressed in the chapter on “Growing,” now seems to me only one kind of strategy for helping students feel like they belong in college, and I want to include some other types of recommendations there as well. This second edition is giving me the opportunity to turn Small Teaching into a comprehensive approach to designing and teaching college courses, and I’m excited to see it through to publication.
Finally, I’m also working with W.W. Norton on a textbook proposal on the interpretation of literature. We are looking to produce a compact, practical guide for students on how to interpret a work of literature, a book that could be combined with any literary anthology (such as their Seagull series) or collection of texts or even open-source materials in an introductory or survey course. Writing a textbook has proven to be a much more challenging endeavor than I would have expected—but I’m enjoying the process of learning something new and stretching my writing and teaching skills.
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Best wishes to all for a good spring semester—or at least as good it gets during this challenging academic year.