Call and Response Pedagogy: Working with Attention

Abstract

Based on my experience as a psychotherapist, I’ve developed a set of pedagogical practices that focus on activating attention in the service of perception and reflection. With the former, the subject directs their attention to their circumstances. In the latter, the subject reflects on the frame of reference that conditions their perceptions. This emphasis on the skilful use of attention characterized my pedagogy when teaching counselling psychology in two postgraduate programs. The preliminary step was to engage the students’ attention by addressing their existential need to belong without having to sacrifice their uniqueness. I chose to use ordinary language to express complex psychological concepts to communicate both with their conceptual minds and their pre-reflective selves. Their conceptual minds are quick to grasp the theoretical significance of the skills being taught, while their pre-reflective self has difficulty enacting those skills. I describe this condition as the difference between the ideal (in this case, theory) and the real (the students’ embodied beliefs). Both teaching and counselling attempt to reduce this difference by devoting as much time to the acknowledgement and acceptance of the Real as to the teaching of the Ideal. This paper enacts and models the same intention for existential engagement by addressing the reader’s pre-reflective self. The pre-reflective is both the site of one’s sedimented, experiential history as well as the locus of one’s most significant existential investments. Those investments are attachments to, and identifications with beliefs that promise to guarantee one’s continuing existence. The degree to which those beliefs are addressed increases the possibility of transformation. Furthermore, I’m inviting the reader to test the concepts offered here against the touchstone of their experience. Finally, I describe in detail those pedagogical practices that instantiate the theoretical principles articulated at the beginning of the paper.  For education to have pragmatic consequences, it needs to address that part of the psyche that generates action—the pre-reflective self and its preoccupations.