Teaching at the margin - Didaktik in the sphere of attention

ABSTRACT

Attentiveness is a crucial aspect in the practice of teaching. As teaching always is teaching about something, ideas, values, events, or objects, it both draws and forms the attention of the students. When contemplating on and looking into the term “attention”, it is apparent that it is not at all, a clear and well-defined concept. Acknowledging the relational aspects of teaching and its role in the formation of attention, the article seeks to turn away from psychologically, behaviorally, and cognitively based (or biased) perspectives that frame attention as either an individual capacity of the student or an expected student behavior in the classroom (Rytzler 2017). It also seeks to contribute to discussions of philosophy of education, where questions about uniqueness, otherness and subjectivity are seen as aspects of attention (c.f., Ingold 2001, Todd 2003, Lewis 2012, Rytzler 2019). In the article is suggested that a phenomenological account of attention adds nuances to an educational understanding of attention, as it comes to life (or not) in the lived practice of teaching. The main purpose is to show how teaching as attention formation, is a relational activity that builds on thing-centered and formative activities that take place in a domain that is both ethical and political but, first and foremost, educational.

KEYWORDS:

• Attention
• Teaching
• Didaktik
• Phenomenology

Introduction

What is the significance of attentiveness in teaching? A spontaneous answer would be that attentiveness is a crucial aspect in the practice of teaching, because if the students do not pay attention there would be no real teaching to talk about. However, the act of teaching, can in itself create attention as teaching always is teaching about something, ideas, values, events, or objects. As such, teaching intends to draw and form the attention of the students. When contemplating on and looking into the term ‘attention’, it is apparent that it is not at all, a clear and well-defined concept. What does it actually mean to pay attention? Attention as a phenomenon is rather illusive, something that not only complicates the relation between attention and teaching, but also the way we understand the relation between humans and their surrounding world. In a teaching context, an imperative of attention, rather than being uttered, is enacted through the teacher’s actions or the material the teacher points towards (Rytzler 2017, 2019). As such, it can be seen as an invitation to students to take their place in and to engage transformatively with the world (see Lewin 2014; Ergas 2015; Masschelein and Simons 2013). The actual ‘paying attention’ would then be to pursue those relations and to activate and explore the transformative potential of the teaching event. With this article, I attempt to ground attention educationally, that is to present a notion of attention that is situated within the relational and existential dimensions of educational practices and encounters, where students are invited to engage in formative and future oriented activities. Acknowledging the relational aspects of teaching and its role in the formation of attention, the article seeks to turn away from psychologically, behaviorally, and cognitively based (or biased) perspectives that frame attention as either an individual capacity of the student or an expected student behavior in the classroom (Rytzler 2017). It also seeks to contribute to discussions of philosophy of education, where questions about uniqueness, otherness and subjectivity are seen as aspects of attention (c.f., Ingold 2001; Todd 2003; Lewis 2012; Rytzler 2019). In the article is suggested that a phenomenological account of attention adds nuances to an educational understanding of attention, as it comes to life (or not) in the lived practice of teaching. The main purpose is to show how teaching as attention formation, is a relational activity that builds on thing-centered and formative activities that take place in a domain that is both ethical and political but, first and foremost, educational.

An educational reclaiming of attention

The word attention stems from the Latin word attendere, which means the act of directing or turning toward, to stretch something toward something, to apply the mind to something, or to strive eagerly for something. William James, one of the fathers of modern psychological research on (and understanding of) attention, stated in his Principles of Psychology that everyone knows what attention is, simply because everyone has experienced a state of attentiveness:

It is the taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawing from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatter-brained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German. (James 1890/1950: 403-404).

James’ telling account of attention has many recognizable traits and is a good starting point in a further explanation and exploration of the phenomenon, even if it is quite uncertain if everyone really knows what attention is and further that attention is not an easy phenomenon to define in scientific terms (Mole 2011). It has also worked as such during large parts in the history of modern attention research (Mole 2011). What James puts his finger on, and what much of this research reveals, is that attention is closely connected to its direct opposite, distraction. It seems easier to understand the activity of paying attention negatively as an ability to not be distracted (Rytzler 2017). Although James provides an illustrating account of what it means to be attentive, or rather what it means to experience a state of attentiveness (i.e. experiencing the negation of distraction) he does not say anything about how to make another person attentive. He does not say anything about how to teach the ability to pay attention. However, in his book, Talks to teachers on psychology, James (1899) takes his insights in psychology and tries to clarify their consequences for the teaching practice. By stressing the difficult task of paying attention to something by force and the almost impossible task to make someone pay attention to something by force, James claims that teaching must concentrate on building on and working with students’ spontaneous attention. As attention is about withdrawing from some things in order to deal consciously with others, the task of any teacher who demands and strives for an attentive class room must create a teaching environment where paying attention is possible in the first place, and where distraction is reduced to a minimum.

James understood attention as something that directs our intention and interest in certain directions, by discriminating others. Something enables us or invites us to engage with that which is drawing our attention, whether is something we observe in our surroundings or some thought we notice in our stream of consciousness. In his line of reasoning, James resonates with a certain line of educational thinking, where attention and education are thought of as relationally constituted phenomena, to be found in educational thinkers such as, e.g. Pestalozzi, Herbart and Montessori, who all approached attention as one of the most crucial educational topics (Rytzler 2017). Pestalozzi focused the importance of developing the sense-perception of children, something that highlighted the relational aspects of both attention and education. Herbart, inspired by Pestalozzi, stressed the importance of the fostering of sense-perception as a means to reach both knowledge and sympathy. Montessori focused on the education of a tactile-based sense-perception, which she understood as an active engagement with the surrounding world as a means for children to develop their own subjectivity (Sobe 2004; Rytzler 2017).

When it comes to research on attention, this research is often conducted through frames of psychology or neurobiology, where attention is conceptualized as a set of cognitive or neurological processes (Parasuraman 2000; Mole 2011). This research and its findings is problematic since it is often incompatible with critical educational perspectives, where ethically and existentially oriented questions about uniqueness, equality and difference are addressed and explored (e.g. Säfström 2005; Biesta 2013, Todd 2003). These latter perspectives have in common that they seek to ground education as a science in its own right, pulling it away from psychologically oriented conceptions. Moving away from a process oriented view towards a qualitative view on attention (Mole 2011) opens up for studying attention as a relational phenomenon, something that resonates with several discussions within the field of education, especially within the philosophy of education where attention is understood as a relational phenomenon emerging from and/or developed in an educational relation or situation (see, e.g. Noddings 2010; Todd 2003; Stiegler 2010; Masschelein and Simons 2013). Ethical at its core, this science approaches education as a relational endeavor of calling forth and placing self-active subjects in a world, rather than as a goal-oriented practice of providing learners with a world constructed by cognitive units. As such, these discussions open up for phenomenologically accounts of attention that resonates with notions of educations where human subjectivity and becoming are central.

A phenomenological account of attention expands its scope into being something more than a cognitive process or a behavior that can function more or less well in the performance of so-called ‘schoolwork’ or an instrumental device through which the goals of curriculum can be reached (no matter what the cost in terms of integrity, difference, and freedom of the students). In short, it provides a theoretical territory, where the notion of attention resonates with educational praxis and thinking (Ingold 2001; Rytzler 2017), and where the words ‘pay attention!’ have a significantly deeper meaning than keeping students from being distracted.

Attention and teaching

The word teaching stems from the Indoeuropean language and the Old English word tǣcan, which means to show. It is also related to the word token, which means a thing serving as a visible or tangible representation of a fact, quality, feeling, etc. (tǣcan 1966). Teaching has to do with presenting something to someone, a simple definition where attention in fact becomes an integral part of the teaching practice itself (Rytzler 2017). The main activity of teaching has to do with presenting a specific content to someone and is as such a form of lived and relational practice that creates, forms, and shares attention. As such, teaching is in itself a form of attention formation, a practice that calls for, directs and brings about attention. In the practice of teaching, one could speak of a certain attention that can be enacted, promoted, and summoned (Rytzler 2017). The fundamental educational gesture is the pointing gesture, and a teacher always points, with explicit means or implicitly through the way she embodies or inhabits her own teaching (Lewin 2014; Mollenhauer 2014; Ergas 2015).

From a critical relational perspective, where the relation is seen as constitutive for educational situations and where the possibility for uniqueness, difference and freedom are regarded as central characteristics for a democratic conception (and ethical realization) of education, the relation between attention and teaching becomes crucial (Rytzler 2017). In several discussions within the philosophy of education, the activity of paying attention is thought of as a relational mode of being in the world rather than as an inherent capacity of the subject. Different qualitative dimensions of attention – like caring (Noddings 1984, 2010; Stiegler 2010), listening (Todd 2003), waiting (Weil 1951/2012; Tubbs 2005; Rytzler 2019), and curiosity (Lewis 2012) – help bring forth the practice of teaching, or rather specific teaching events or activities, as practices that bring about and form attention (Rytzler 2017, 2019). However, in these discussions the significance of the subject matter tend to be underdeveloped (Vlieghe and Zamojski 2019). In the context of teaching, attention is connected to the acts of showing and observing something (see, e.g. Herbart 1896, 1908; Uljens 1997; Caranfa 2007; Mollenhauer 2014; Lewin 2014) and how these acts bring about possible ways for humans to engage in and to take part in the world in relation to this something. Uljens (1997) describes teaching as an activity that directs someone’s attention by showing something as something.

From a Didaktik-perspective, teaching can be seen as an orchestration of artificial life-experiences, where things in the world are re-introduced and presented within the confines of the classroom walls according to teacher’s interpretation of the curriculum and the students’ reception of this (Von Oettingen 2018). From philosophical perspectives on education teaching can be seen as a form of suspension in time, where a common and shared experience forms subjectivity and attention (Rytzler 2017, 2019), but also a public and a public interest (Masschelein and Simons 2013; Rancière 2010; Säfström 2014). As such, teaching is a place specific gathering, where time is slowed down in order for the students to encounter a complex world, filtered through specific interests and perspectives (Mollenhauer 2014). The most common figure in the educational literature on teaching, the Didaktik triangle, is a fruitful point of departure when addressing the complexity of relations that are all at work in the activity of teaching. The Didaktik triangle works as a gravitational center for the fundamentally relational and dynamic characteristics of teaching (Künzli 2002) as well as it reminds us that teaching always is about something specific. From a relational perspective a student only becomes a student in relation to, on the one hand, the teacher and, on the other hand, the subject matter. The teacher becomes in the same manner defined through her relation to the subject matter and the student. However, it is the teacher’s responsibility to not only point towards the subject-matter, but to engage with it and the students in such a way that it brings about change and renewal (Ryther 2014). Furthermore, there is a reciprocal dimension to this relational interpretation in which the relation between the student and the subject matter calls for the teacher’s attention. Teaching is also an activity of joint-attention formation, since the different layers of attention to the subject matter need to be disputed, shared and formed. The Didaktik triangle directs the discussions concerning becoming, subjectivity and transformation towards both form and content of educative events (Rytzler 2017). Teaching, as the formation of attention, is framed as a continuously evolving relation between the student, the teacher and the subject-matter and becomes an event where a manifold of interests are formed towards the educational token, that which is pointed towards (and which itself is pointing towards something in the world). The teacher shows something as something, and the student encounters this something as something. This relational activity is captured in the educational principles Aufforderung zur Selbsttätikeit and Bildsamkeit, as they brings to the fore teaching as a relational, situation-specific and thing-centered activity (Uljens 1998, 1997). It is in the double act of showing something as something and receiving something as something that attention is formed. The context of teaching and attention becomes a sort of nexus for human subjectivity and the event of subjectification, which needs further exploration. To further understand attention as an educational phenomenon, it can be fruitful to visit some phenomenologically driven discussions where the relation between subject and object is problematized in ways that are educationally relevant.

Educating (within) a sphere of attention

In mainstream attention research, the human subject, or the self, is not of particular interest and is often seen as a distractor in typical experiments, where persons’ reactions to certain visual or auditive stimuli are measured (Mole 2011; Arvidson 2006). Phenomenology, works in a rather opposite direction, stressing its interest in the subject, or subjectivity, defined through its directedness towards the world, its intentionality. The phenomenological account of subjectivity thus lies very close to the adverbial account of attention as they both address the unique and place-specific situation that characterizes attending activities (Arvidson 2006; Mole 2011). In relation to this, teaching is a very peculiar form of these kinds of activities due to its artificial traits (Von Oettingen 2018). In the class room, the teacher forms a context by orchestrating relations between herself, the subject matter and the students in order for the students to engage with this subject matter, through study, attention, and work (Rancière 2010; Masschelein and Simons 2013). The class room becomes a form of attention machine, powered by the engagement with the subject matter, i.e. its thing-centered pedagogy (Vlieghe and Zamojski 2019).

In phenomenological educational research, the student is understood as a place- specific, material and embodied existence (Hagström 2018), and the ways in which teachers take responsibility for their class room as a whole, becomes crucial. By focusing on the human as a living being that is engaged in the world through her lived embodied experience, it becomes difficult to separate the human subject from the world where she is situated. Varela, Thomson, and Rosch (1991) have described the human subject as someone that comes about as a living system that brings forth a world through a series of structural couplings with the environment. With this embodied approach, attention can no longer just be about selecting themes or objects in relation to a context as it is as much being a part of and creating a context in relation to that which is not yet part of the context. This is also where certain phenomenological approaches to attention coincide with educational approaches. The idea that human existence is an active engagement, which through recursive series of historically structured couplings brings forth a world, points towards two specific educational features. The first feature is explicit, as this phenomenological approach highlights the relation between history and future as something crucial to human interaction, as human beings and their environment are interconnected in a process of co-creation (Varela, Thomson, and Rosch 1991). The second feature is more implicit, as the approach opens up an ethical/political space through which the asymmetric traits of the process of structural coupling come to the fore. Educational processes might emerge in all sorts of inter-personal relationships but educational thought is first-handedly a result of thinking about a specific set of interpersonal relations, namely the intergenerational ones shaped at the intersection of history and future (Uljens 1998). In the class room, students bring forth their own world, both in relation to their own history and in relation to how the teacher brings forth a possible future for the students. It is in this, sometimes rather radical, encounter with the world that we can speak of teaching as the formation of attention (c.f., Stiegler 2010)

A model that takes into consideration both empirical results from psychological research and first person experiences of attention, is P. Sven Arvidson’s sphere of attention (Arvidson 2006). This model is educationally fruitful, since it offers a dynamic account of attention that resonates with the dynamics of the teaching practice and its complex network of relations. In Arvidson’s model – which is based on an interpretation of ‘the phenomenology of context’, provided by Aron Gurwitsch (2010) – attention is framed as an active engagement within a marginal field, a thematic field and a contextual field that are all interconnected and dependent upon each other. Bringing teaching into this model, means that a teacher cannot just direct someone’s attention as she must navigate in a relational context where attention enfolds through transformations between thematic, contextual and marginal consciousness. What turns this overlapping of attentional contexts into an educational space is that someone must be responsible for maintaining the object of interest. As educational practices are embedded in a relational and contextual setting, the notion of an attentional sphere accentuates the dynamic aspects of attention and its close relationship with educational processes, especially in relation to the lived practice of teaching. It is only in the relation between an educator, someone being educated, and a specific content that we can speak of an educational practice. James (1899) claimed that paying attention by pure will, was an impossible task, something that several empirical investigations on so called volitional attention later come to verify (Ljungdalh 2016). A teacher should, according to James, therefore work with the spontaneous attention of the students, something that was possible through pointing towards the subject matter and promoting an active engagement with the same.

Drawing from the above phenomenological accounts as well as James’ recommendations, we can say that a teacher who presents an object or an idea in front of the class – by showing it, asking questions about it or letting it pass through the hands of the students – is engaged in a reordering of a relational domain by offering new relational entanglements, between herself and the students, between the students themselves, and between the students and the outside world. Depending on each student’s relational history, this act of teaching opens up different future paths, for the students to enter. Here, the notion of the margin of the attentional sphere becomes especially interesting, as it opens up for an analysis of the dynamic interplay between context and subjectivity, which often characterizes an educational event or practice. This is due to the fact that teaching is not only about pointing towards a specific content. It is also a specific form of attention formation as it, by calling self-aware and self-active subjects into being, brings about awareness of an outside world that sets up the concrete as well as ethical limits of these subjects (Rytzler 2017, 2019; Säfström 2014). Teaching is therefore the unfolding of a relational complex made up of the intersections and cross-sections of the attentional spheres of teacher and student. The insertion of a specific teaching content has the potential to address the students as subjects that produce meaning and understanding, and that transforms their spheres of attention. The teachers responsibility then goes beyond the act of showing, as she also must point (Look at this!), ask questions (What do you see?) and demand that the students engage with the content (What do you make of it?) (c.f., Rancière 2010; Cornelissen 2010)

Attention is, as has been shown, tends to be easier to define negatively as an ability to not be distracted from whatever is (or should be) important in a given situation. Students, as people in general, are always open for redirecting their attention towards new themes and forming their attention in relation to these themes. This openness is what in some attention research is called attentional set or control set (Arvidson 2006). With the phenomenological, dynamic and embodied accounts of subjectivity, provided by Gurwitsch (2010), Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991), and Arvidson (2006), the question of attention, as regards the practice of teaching, becomes a question about identifying and distinguishing between different transformations within the sphere of attention, where attention is the over-all direction of embodied life-world experience. Since people’s way of attending have habitual traits, selective attention is neither totally arbitrary nor completely controlled by the attending subject (Gurwitsch 2010; Arvidson 2006. However, it can be developed through the teaching practice, where the directing of attention has to do with the growing ability to ignore irrelevant marginal content and how to acknowledge potentially relevant marginal content and making sense of it (Luntley 2004). When a teacher seeks an attentive class room, she has to orchestrate the contextual, thematic and marginal shifts within a plurality of attentional spheres. As such, she has to be able to create and to deconstruct attention, as the borders between context and margin sometimes must be dissolved in order for new thematic fields to appear (Rytzler 2017).

Teaching at the margin

So far we can, at least from a phenomenological perspective, see that teaching is a relationally dependent enactment of a summons to self-activity, where students are summoned to take place as concrete others within the material, discursive, social and ethical confines as they enfold in the practice itself (Rytzler 2017). As such, teaching works as a form of canalization for subjectivity by bringing about a place for possible actions, events and situations (Biesta 2013). As educational practices are highly context-dependent and since the formation of subjectivity, as an intergenerational, societal and ethical activity, lies at the heart of educational thinking and practice, the notion of a marginal consciousness elucidates the question of attention from an educational point of view. In the phenomenological approaches, attention becomes a vessel for the description of lived experience as it enfolds from moment to moment (Rytzler 2017). As the continuity and discontinuity of the margin is what enables transformations within the attentional field, it is also a central aspect when understanding the relation between teaching and attention.

Within the context of teaching not all experiences are sought for and education must always be understood as a fundamentally uncertain domain of human interaction (Biesta 2013). This uncertainty is connected to the marginal sphere of attention, as it makes possible changes in both theme and context by supplying horizontal connections to items that potentially can become thematic. It is all too easy to dismiss student actions as just being results of distraction. However, there is always something lingering in the margin and without a margin the dynamics of the teaching practice would get lost. Teaching should always be about taking responsibility for both the integrity of the student and the ethical/political domain, opened up by her actions. The activities within the teaching practice have temporality as their necessary condition and serve to unify the marginal, thematic and contextual field. These temporal aspects infuse all attentional dimensions with potentiality. Almost, everything that the teacher does, says or presents can lead to totally unexpected results, some fruitful and some destructive. Teaching at the margin of the attentional field must be open to these peripheral events as they have the potential to either bring or welcome something significant to particular situations. To teach is thus to offer possible (and reasonable) ways of imagining a future subject and a future world. In their formation of attention, teaching must take into consideration the relation between students as unique subjects and their possibilities to take place in and be a part of the surrounding world (Biesta 2013; Rytzler 2019). The margin is an a priori necessary condition for this to happen. In marginal consciousness, three sets of data are of importance: A certain segment of the stream of consciousness, our embodied existence, and a certain sector of our perceptual environment (Arvidson 2006), that is everything that works as a backdrop for that which is the center of interest. Subjectivity and intersubjectivity are to be found in this interplay between the contextual and marginal sphere of attention where the marginal consciousness either coexists with or creates a break in the thematic field. Subjectivity is a temporal chain of events of the process of attending, and is thus engaged in a strong relationship between subjectivity and attention. The word I, refers to an awareness of that sector of the perceptual world in which a speaker experiences himself as placed (Arvidson 2006), so the self is something we see through rather than look at. Therefore it can never be represented, but we can present ourselves as subjects in a world, in front of other human beings. Attention contains, therefore, the negation of one’s self-assertion and also the surrender of oneself to the matter in hand (Arvidson 2006). The marginal sphere of attention is thus where human subjectivity lingers and were teaching can begin. Being addressed as a subject in a teaching situation is to be invited from the margin in order to take part in the world and to be a part of it (i.e. What do You make of this?).

Teaching as the practice of pointing towards specific things, presenting specific perspectives, and sharing certain values turns the attentional field into a place-specific and context-dependent flux in and between the three main teaching relations (teacher/content, teacher/student, and student/content). The notion of marginal attention offers a way of analyzing experiences of sudden changes of context and subjectivity that are orchestrated through educational encounters, events and practices. For instance, what happens when a student asks an unexpected question, when students do something that seems completely contrary to what the teacher has asked them to do, or when something extraordinary has happened this particular day that turns the original planning upside down? What is at stake is in what way the margin functions from the perspective of the teachers’ attentional sphere. Is the margin just a field of background-noise that should be ignored or are there to be found potential voices within the marginal sphere that await educational considerations, and thus attention (see e.g. Ryther 2014; Säfström 2014)? A student can function as theme, context and margin of the teacher’s attentional sphere, as can the subject matter and the teacher as regards the students. The teacher, as the one being responsible for both the subject matter and the integrity of the student, must arrange and guard the context, so that the students approach the theme, i.e. the subject matter, from a reasonable and graspable context (Rytzler 2017). However, students, as well as the teacher, can affect the context of the attentional sphere in different ways; narrowing it down, expanding it, altering it, or even change it (Arvidson 2006).

To teach is not only to create a contextual scene where different content is presented and pointed towards in order for the students to be engaged and involved with. It is also to pay attention to other possible contexts that students bring into and embody in the classroom. In the lived class room, the students are something more than students, they are also individual persons, exposed to a world of other individual persons. Subjectivity in phenomenology, as in the ethical domain of education, has to do with the confrontation between two distinct identities: the self and the other. If the model of an attentional sphere brings to focus the crucial relationship between the context and the margin regulated by the workings of an attentional halo that discriminates between relevant and non-relevant material, we see that this process can be approached as a subject’s struggle for sense-making in (or of) a particular educational situation, as she is presented or shown something by another person. In that sense, the marginal halo becomes a key-component in teaching as a particular way of being addressed as a unique subject (c.f., Biesta 2013). Being addressed in the teaching event means that a student is given place in order to find herself in a world among other human beings, i.e. she is invited to become an attentive subject, with a history and a (not yet) given future. What is at stake in the teaching practice, is this confrontation that is always connected to educational possibilities as well as educational dilemmas and risks (Todd 2003; Hållander 2016). Not everything is educationally possible or desirable, but a lot of things are considerable and thinkable.

In conclusion

In this article I have engaged in a form of theorizing about attention from within a domain of educational thinking, where the relational and ethical characters of educational practices are addressed, this through discussions about subjectivity, intersubjectivity and what it means to be addressed as a human subject. Furthermore, by highlighting attention formation as, not only a specific relational and situational, but also a thing-centered phenomenon, I have approached the teaching practice as an educational domain where subjects can come forward and take or make a place for themselves in the world and of the world. In this domain, attention becomes something more than the maturation of the individual person; it also becomes a dynamic way for this person to enter into the world as an irreplaceable subject with an open future. As teaching has been brought forward as the activity of presenting something as something to someone, and of sharing experiences of this something, whether it is a story of injustice, a beautiful poem, or a complex mathematical theorem, the Didaktik triangle was introduced to provide an ontological orientation to the phenomenon of attention-formation and its relationship with the practice of teaching. From this educational point of view, where teaching is an enactment of a summons to self-activity, the very nexus of subjectivity and formation of subjectivity lies in a specific confrontation between self and otherness that takes place in the teaching event. I have investigated this confrontation as something that unfolds within the three dimensions of the attentional sphere and in relation to the educational token presented by the teacher. To teach is to introduce educationally significant tokens in ways that bring about attentive relations and formative activities. In relation to this I have, finally, drawn attention to the importance of a teacher that takes responsibility for the reasonable limits of the attentional sphere at the same time as she is seeking educational breaches in the marginal halo. By pointing towards or enacting the object of interest, the activity of teaching calls self-aware and self-active subjects into being, and brings about an awareness of an outside world that sets up the concrete as well as the ethical limits of these subjects. In conclusion, teaching as a practice of attention formation is situated in a relational domain of educational events and encounters, where the dynamic interplay between the three dimensions of attention, theme, context and margin allows for new and fruitful encounters with the surrounding world. There, at the borders of the marginal halo, teachers and students can either be placed, claim a place or be given a place, in the world as embodied attending beings among other attending beings as they come together in the study of the educational tokens at hand, in order to infuse them with value, interest and meaning. It is also here that we can speak of Didaktik in a sphere of attention.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.