A major thread of public discourse is our desire — our need — for protected spaces.
In Attensity: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement, SANCTUARY is one of the group’s pillars for liberating attention from the “human fracking” of endless scroll, data mining, and isolation.
As the collective authors of that manifesto explain, sanctuaries are spaces where “we can remember that it feels good to give our mind, time, senses to the stuff and the beings we actually care about.”
These spaces are varied and often individualized, but they share the quality of being spaces where “we can reconnect to a feeling of attentional agency, and where we can explore and foster new and other forms of attention that are not the single (monetized) variety over-cultivated and continuously pump-and-dumped into the frackosphere.”
Citing Harry Frankfurt, Attensity calls “The central challenge of our moment” the quandary of how to “want what you want to want.”
After reading Attensity, I felt a lot of things click into place as an educator who has watched major shifts in the way that students interact with the world.
One thing that really struck me was the idea of “reconnecting” to feelings of attentional agency.
That resonates with me as an “elder millennial” who has some memories that are pre-internet and a lot of formative years that were pre-social media and well before the “endless scroll.”
It’s hard enough for me to know what I want to want, and I have a lot of footholds to call upon. How hard is it to know what you want to want without those?
What does “reconnecting” mean for a group of learners who have never experienced a time before their attention was being siphoned off by so many greedy straws?
These days, I often feel distracted and fractured when I try to do something like read a challenging book. But I have the memories and practiced capacities to know that there’s another way. I know my brain is capable of reading more deeply and with more focus because it’s done it before. But what if you don’t have those memories, that confidence in your own capacity?
Perhaps this is why professors are baffled by, say, students who voluntarily signed up to take film studies classes but then found they couldn’t sustain their attention to a feature length film. Perhaps this is why the recent influx of college students are begging for more support.
Take this line from the student-penned “Dear educators, Gen Z here. Could you please teach us like it’s 2026?“: “We want to learn how to critically think, but it’s too tempting to do what’s easier, faster and will earn us the best grade to maximise our chances of, say, getting into medical school, keeping our scholarships and passing our classes to graduate.”
All of that was bouncing around in the back of my mind as I taught last semester’s live classes.
Often, I ask learners to do some forced free writing in live classes. Practically speaking, this means that I ask them to handwrite or type for ten minutes without stopping or re-reading. If they get stuck, they’re supposed to just write “I don’t know, I don’t know” until the ideas flow again. If they have a new idea mid-sentence, they just skip a line and keep going. There are no expectations for grammar, punctuation, or even complete thoughts. Dump it out on the page and see what you find.
Philosophically, this means that learners are given permission to give their full permission to their own thoughts without external pressures. It means that they’re given space to explore and make mistakes and feel silly and find brilliant insights.
It’s an exercise I’ve been leaning on for teaching writing for more than twenty years, and it’s a staple of rhetorical pedagogy.
But something new is happening.
In the past, when I’d assign a five-minute forced free write, I’d have students heavy sighing in the last thirty seconds, students who threw their pen down with relief when I said “TIME!” For the most part, students found the exercise productive but also kind of exhausting. I’d have to work up to longer sessions, and ten minutes was the upper limit.
Recently, though, I’ve been giving five-minute free write periods, and when the timer goes off, multiple students are disappointed. They’re asking for more time. They’re excited to keep going.
I stumbled upon a virtual sanctuary.
This shouldn’t be that surprising. There’s been a rise of virtual co-working services. (I personally use Caveday for this and love it — that’s not an affiliate plug, just a genuine share.)
But I hadn’t thought about what it might feel like to have space in an educational setting for students who have spent their whole lives in a world that’s been systematically destroying such sanctuary for thinking.
I don’t believe the narrative that today’s learners aren’t capable of deep attention. I do believe they’ve grown up the most attentionally challenging environment in human history. Our responsibility as educators is to carve out spaces of sanctuary so they can do the work of finding out what they want to want, including knowing what capacity for attention and critical thinking they are capable of reaching.
Carving out these sanctuaries is — whether we think about it that way or not — one of the benefits of homeschooling. We have more opportunities to make these spaces.
My challenge, as a virtual educator, is to carve out these spaces even as learners sit on devices that carry some of the most alluring distractions. I think that focusing on discussions and creating engaging classroom environments is a big part of that.
I am also very proud of creating sanctuaries that welcome neurodiverse, LGBTQ+, and other students who have not felt safe or supported in their own physical communities.
Still, I’m excited to rise to the challenge of making my virtual space one where students are invited and encouraged to tend to their capacities for attention.
One way I’m doing that is starting new “Focused Writing Sessions” open to all students enrolled in my live and guided classes.
I’ll be continuing to muse on the possibilities and am excited to learn from and learn with these smart kids who are finding their sanctuaries.
