Introduction
In this chapter, I focus my attention on Selma Sevenhuijsen’s (2018) explication of attention vis-à-vis an ethic of care. Following Sevenhuijsen, a care ethicist, pedagogical encounters would be unthinkable without attention. In all four notions of caring discussed in the previous chapter (i.e. caring about, taking care of, care-giving and care receiving), the idea of attention was prominent, in the sense that caring cannot exist without the practice of attending to oneself and others. Sevenhuijsen’s claim is that ‘practising active attention starts with our self, with a willingness to reflect on our own actions and reactions, with the intention to improve the quality of our caring interactions with others’ (Sevenhuijsen, 2018: 3). It is such a self-activity of attentive caring that I shall discuss in relation to pedagogical encounters.
On Being Attentive
According to Sevenhuijsen (2018: 3), caring as attention or attentive caring comprises a ‘waiting’ and ‘holding’ dimension. Firstly, the ‘waiting’ dimension of attention ‘refers to the need to suspend one’s own suppositions, images and preoccupations when engaging in a caring interaction’ (Sevenhuijsen, 2018: 3). In other words, when teachers attend to students, they engage in waiting where they see the students as they are and could be. That is, teachers should be able to see both the actuality and potential of their students who remain in becoming. Secondly, when teachers engage in the ‘holding’ dimension of attentive caring they attend well to students and suspend and hold back their own feelings, attachments and ‘fixed ideas’ to acknowledge the otherness within their students. Whereas the waiting aspect of attentive care involves ‘taking time before engaging in over hastened or unreflected forms of need-interpretation … [holding makes us] able to reach out to others … and be attentive to what is happening inside us’ (Sevenhuijsen, 2018: 5). Put differently, if teachers want to take care of students they have to develop ‘an active will for inner growth … [such as] the overcoming of inner barriers for change and dealing with complex – often repressed – emotions like sorrow, anger, fear, aggression and despair’ (Sevenhuijsen, 2018: 5).[A]ttention is an activity that is aimed at human flourishing … [and] practicing active attention starts with our self, with a willingness to reflect on our own actions and reactions, with the intention to improve the quality of our caring interactions with others.
I am specifically thinking of the Arabic dictum, ‘man ‘arafa nafsahu qadd ‘arafa rabbahu’ – whoever knows himself or herself, knows his or her Lord (al-Attas, 1993b: 69). For many Arab and Muslim peoples all over the world, this Arabic expression is quite significant in the sense that learning starts with what Sevenhuijsen (2018: 5) refers to as caring for the soul. According to al-Attas (1993b: 18), knowing the self implies that meanings of things have arrived in the soul. In other words, a caring soul is one that is imbued with knowledge, which in turn is infused with wisdom (hikmah) and justice (adl ) and, contribute towards goodness (adab) within the individual self (al-Attas, 1993b: 22–23). In this regard, al-Attas (1993a: 25) posits that disciplining the soul – what I would interpret as caring for the soul – potentially produces a good person who in turn contributes to the goodness (justice) of society. Consequently, al-Attas (1993b: 34) avers that a loss of soul is tantamount to the loss of the capacity for discernment and to see things in their appropriate places. This makes sense on the basis that not caring for the soul could lead to injustices within the HE system (al-Attas, 1993a: 38). Thus, when pedagogical encounters do not recognise the importance of caring for the soul of teachers and students, such encounters would remain inattentive and unengaging for that matter. When I visited the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilisation (ISTAC) in Kuala Lumpur in the 1990s as a post-doctoral fellow, on invitation from its director, Prof. Wan Muhammad Nor Wan Daud, I was exposed to learning from an Islamic perspective. What I constantly encountered through the lectures of its founder, Prof. Syed Muhhamad Naquib al-Attas, was that learning ought to be induced through adab – goodness – which students have to internalise in order for them to acquire wisdom and knowledge. In other words, during my time at ISTAC, I experienced a profound accentuation of caring for the soul before knowledge, as it was taught, could be made sense of. The point is that, for Muslim scholars, the acquisition of knowledge is conditional upon an attentiveness to the soul. That makes sense, because caring for the soul invokes in one an earnestness to pursue higher education. Consequently, one finds that when post-graduate students are initiated into an understanding of knowledge, they are reminded – during their introduction to learning – to be attentive to their souls – a matter of becoming persons of adab. Therefore, it is not surprising that al-Attas (1993a) blames the decline of higher education in the Arab and Muslim world, as a result of a lack of adab, or an inattentiveness to the soul. Next, I address the question how pedagogical encounters would unfold if they were to function on the basis of attentive caring.
Attentive Pedagogical Encounters
Based on the afore-mentioned notion of attentive caring, I now offer an account of three democratic moments that could be opened up within university pedagogical encounters. Firstly, when teachers and students engage in attentive pedagogical encounters, they recognise one another as being in the present – that is, they are ‘there’ and not absent from the encounter. When both teachers and students are present, they care about the matters under consideration – that is, they are both inspired by the lesson and want to learn from one another’s understandings of the lesson. If teachers and students are not present, teaching and learning would not materialise. The actuality that teachers teach means that they are in the presence of students who are expected to learn. In other words, bringing teachers and students into the presence of teaching and learning respectively, is a condition of democratic education. In this way, caring would hopefully be in attention. The point about teachers bringing students into the present has to do with bringing the curricular matter into ‘contact’ with students who are expected to be ‘touched’ by it – in other words, teachers bring curricula matters ‘near’ to students (Masschelein & Simons, 2011: 162).
Secondly, when teachers are attentive in care to students, there is already an implicit assumption on the part of teachers that when they bring a curriculum matter to students, the students are able to make sense of what they are being taught. As aptly put by Masschelein and Simons (2011: 162), when teachers bring students into presence, ‘they [students] come to their senses … [a]nd the lesson can only start at the moment that the burden of inability falls away’. Following this line of thought, the university is the place where our knowledge and capabilities are enacted unconstrainedly within pedagogical encounters.
Thirdly, when teachers attentively care for students, they actually ‘give all students new chances over and over again’ (Masschelein & Simons, 2011: 163). This means that students are not left to their own devices but rather, caring teachers ask ‘for attention from students’ (Masschelein & Simons, 2011: 163). In this way, teachers ‘make the experience of a new use [of curricular knowledge] possible at all [as a consequence of] love for the world and the new generation’ (Masschelein & Simons, 2011: 163). As a consequence of such an understanding of pedagogical encounters, Sevenhuijsen (2018: 7–8) is right when she associates attentive caring with the cultivation of presence, discernment and having trust and honour in our students.
Considering such an explication of attentive caring, I am still baffled by the then Malaysian government’s decision to curb the intellectualism of ISTAC and its founder-director, Professor al-Attas. ISTAC was incorporated into the Faculty of Education at the International Islamic University of Malaysia and its founder-director was put on premature retirement. Ever since, ISTAC, considered by its proponents as a ‘beacon on the crest of a hill’ never lived up to its status of an attentively caring HEI, primarily because an advancement of presence, knowledge and discernment never really remained associated with the institute. The point is, political intervention seemed to have derailed the scholarly intensions of an illustrious institute of learning. It is not so much the curtailment of knowledge but more importantly, the opportunity for scholars to have acquired the appropriate care to pursue their intellectual advances that was dealt a heavy blow.
Summary
In sum, attentive caring offers opportunities for both teachers and students to be in one another’s presence through which they can exercise the capacities to make sense of what is being presented to them. In addition, being attentive through caring also affords participants to use their chances to come to understanding about what is known and what is still to come. In a different way, attentive caring within pedagogical encounters creates opportunities for students to engage in what Gert Biesta (2011: 34) refers to as a pedagogy without explanation. Such a pedagogy allows students to learn for themselves because they have been brought into attention by teachers. According to Biesta (2011: 35), through a pedagogy without explanation, students ‘can see and think for themselves and are not dependent upon others [teachers] who claim that they can see and think for them [students]’. In other words, through a pedagogy without explanation, teachers are answerable and attentive to students without always instructing them (the students) what to think and do.