About

Course description

Welcome to Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness, a 200-level undergraduate course in presearch methodology, designed to develop participants’ capacities to pay attention to their everyday environments. This course has been developed in response to teachings from Indigenous methodologies, place-based pedagogies, and concepts such as “Land as first teacher” (Styres, 2011), and is intended for students across all disciplines. The priorities, practices, and processes are dicipline-agnostic because all research is embodied in specific environments.

Participants’ attention to Land will be enhanced through repeated and reflexive embodied practice. Topics covered include sensory perception, representation of experience through media, multi-being relationality, attention to embodiment in time and space, the roles of language in perception, multi-sensory storying, and research paradigms. Course activities will draw on a mix of artistic, experiential, reflexive, and theoretical material. The materials have been designed for a group of 20 to 25 participants.

Why is this important?

Consumer-capitalist infrastructures and demands endanger many of the systems, beings, and relationships that make possible our human lives and those of our other-than-human kin. This course is grounded in a belief that “crafting better possibilities for shared life” (van Dooren et al., 2016, p. 17) requires deep, committed, and responsible thought in response to this reality. The systems, beings, and relationships that facilitate our lives and livelihoods as humans, also support the research that we do as researchers. This connection to Land in research may be most easily identified in disciplines such as anthropology, geography, ecology, and others that incorporate fieldwork as a primary research activity. However, as an inorganic chemist for example, if you are ordering chemicals from a supplier, those chemicals are Land, Land from and with which you aim to produce and synthesize knowledge. If you work primarily on a computer, the plastics and metals of which the machine is comprised are Land, as is the electricity that makes it run, from water, sun, wind, or oil, or coal: all Land. And the once-trees-now-post-its… You get the point. How we notice, relate to, and develop new patterns of noticing and new relationships with those systems, beings, and relationships matters, both for our lives and for our research.

“You learn from the parts of the story you focus on” (Gadsby, 2018). These words, spoken by Hannah Gadsby in her show Nannette, represent the possibilities research holds. Perception and inquiry have the ability to open us up to other parts and other stories. In order to focus on and learn from those parts, we first have to learn the arts of attentiveness through which they can be perceived. Otherwise, so-very-many lived stories in the world will not be expressed or shared through academic research (Kuokkanen, 2007).

Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness centers process and protocol in a learning-by-doing model. We will engage in becoming aware of the process of becoming aware, neither of which are ever finished, but always becoming: a praxis that requires practice. This course provides a framework for this practice, centering Land as first teacher (Zinga & Styres, 2011), and making and holding time and space for participants to explore the attentional arts (methods) that work well for them as individuals. In parallel, we will explore the education of attention (methodology) as an ethic through which to root inquiry. Bringing this practice and theory together will help participants cultivate capacities to activate their own attentiveness in the future, when they are preparing to articulate a research paradigm and associated theory/ies of change.

Learning outcomes

This course is designed to develop a methodology of attunement to every-day environments. Over the course of the semester participants will build capacities to:

  • Build a nourishing class environment, both virtually and in person.
  • Produce, and recognize the value of, flexible and accessible media using the principles of universal design.
  • Analyse personal, ethical, and research implication in environmental issues according to the
    themes and theories explored in this course.
  • Employ repetition as a pedagogical tool for learning with every-day environments.
  • Reflect on sensory engagement with every-day environments.
  • Identify and describe patterns of attentiveness through embodied reflection on experiences.
  • Effectively communicate pathways through which patterns of attention are created.
  • Explore walking, encountering, recording encounters, and intentional duration in a consistent, committed practice.
  • Query the different roles that language plays in patterns of attentiveness.
  • Draw on diverse textual, audio, and video sources to support reflection on embodied practice.
  • Use advanced reflective learning skills to curate an archive that will showcase how practice can lead to praxis.

Access, ability?

Is this format working for you? While this curriculum has been developed with the principles of universal design in mind, it may be the case that some elements or activities are not suited for specific participants. Should any barriers to participation arise or be anticipated, please contact the instructor.  All course components are flexible and can be re-organized to suit any participant.

Prerequisites

There are no course prerequisites for Cultivating Arts of Attention.