ATTENTION IN TEACHING AND SCHOOL LEARNING
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5937/metpra28-52580Keywords:
attention, teaching, learning, focalization, didacticsAbstract
The issue of attention in teaching seems prima facie familiar and almost trivial. In the teaching practice, attention is taken for granted. Anyone who has worked in teaching knows that it is necessary to attract and maintain students’ attention, and that it is an integral element of every school lesson. But what is precisely attention and why is it important for teaching? Are the conceptualizations of attention simple, unequivocal and unambiguous? In the paper, we examine the conceptualization of attention from the perspective of teaching and school learning, first through a theoretical analysis of traditional definitions of attention in the psychological literature, then we examine one of the contemporary philosophical positions on attention, and in the main part of the paper we examine the concept of attention in teaching and school learning from a specifically pedagogical-psychological and didactic perspective. The aim of our paper is to demonstrate that even an elementary overview of theoretical definitions (such as we provide in this paper) confirms that the conceptualization of attention in teaching and school learning is neither simple nor unambiguous and that it is based on a series of open theoretical questions and conceptual dilemmas, which makes attention a non-trivial and provocative didactic issue, requiring continuous elaboration and research.
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