3 Attunement and attentionality
Attuning to the interconnectivity of ourselves, our learning and our environments is not only to think cognitively, but to pay attention with all of our senses (Cooke et al., 2023). This will allow ideas, connections, relationships and new knowings to emerge and be responded to.
Masschelein (2010) argues that such attentionality is not aimed at arriving at a particular perspective or vision (as could be considered in situations where educators have a pre-planned outcome and exert power over what learning occurs), but to open ourselves to the world. This challenges us to be present in ‘such a way that the present can present itself to me’ (p. 48), and in which we allow our gaze to be ‘liberated’ so that we can see differently. Masschelein describes the act of such attentionality as involving a ‘suspension of judgement… a kind of waiting’ (p. 48), to really attend to what is occurring.
This attention and attunement is important to transdisciplinarity as it allows us and our learners to reposition ourselves towards objects or concepts of inquiry – seeing, feeling, and exploring them anew. This is a significant political act – shifting attention and attunement to things beyond storied understandings within a given discipline. For example, tuning in and attending to terms such as ‘cell’ or ‘pattern’ or ‘connectivity’ across disciplinary frameworks opens up new possibilities for understandings.
This process of attunement involves paying attention to more than the linguistic, more than the text, more than the screen, more than the mono-disciplinary view but involves our whole ‘body-minds’ (Dewey, 1929, p. 232). We can think, feel and enact understandings of these terms (and many others) through many modes beyond words. This refocusing and reconnecting body, mind, concept and object asks learners to attend, not only to the future gains of their study but to the final result and the here and now, and also to the troubles that are currently being faced and the generative opportunities that arise.
Activity 5.2 The power of paying attention
Use the videos below to help you re-experience the familiar.
1a. 
Watch Videos 1–3 below from Kay McCrann’s blog.
2. 
Now think about a disciplinary concept that you teach, or if you teach across disciplines, an area you feel you would like to explore (which could relate to your responses to Activity 5.1).
For your chosen concept or area, think about how your learners, with their access to the environments, materials, resources they have, could (re)experience the concept, area or issues through an embodied experience that helps them attune and attend to the learning in a way they otherwise would not. Examples could be:
- The physical concept of diffraction – experienced by paddling in a river.
- The mathematics of pattern and geometry and symmetry – experienced through close attention (including touching) their natural occurrences in plants in a garden or shells on a beach.
- The educational and psychological concepts of behaviours – experienced and attuned to through considering animal, family, work, community behaviours across different activities and settings.
- An author's description of a woodland camp – experienced and attuned to by walking, touching, smelling and then creating own writings while in amongst trees.
The notion of echo, reverb and silence in music and physics – experienced through playing with sound in different interior spaces to ‘feel’ the sound movements respond to different material designs.
Consider how you would set up the activity for your students.
3. 
Summarise your thoughts on devising your activity in about 200 words and post your summary to the Activity 5.2 forum discussion.
2 Transdisciplinarity: an imperative for sustainable pedagogies