ABSTRACT

Educators are “weirding” knowledge all of the time, because they believe it is motivating. This is part of a science of pedagogy that constructs the need for a technology of attention. Because students are not learning in a context in which they are engaged in some way, the educator has to manipulate the environment so that the student “attends” to a body of “content.” One technique is to make the content into an attractor – something that attracts attention. All other activity in the environment is understood then as a distractor – something that pulls the student’s attention away from the content of instruction. Within this approach to curriculum and classroom practice, knowledge must be “weirded” if it is to become an attractor. Otherwise the student will be preoccupied by inappropriate activity. In this way we can understand that motivation is essentially a task of weirding. Without weirding a student cannot behave as if she or he is motivated to attend, for otherwise there is nothing that stands out from all potential attractors to become the specific attractor of attention. The one attractor at once defines itself as attractor and all potential other attractors as distractors. There are thus contradictions inherent in this discourse of education: attractors are simultaneously distractors; distractors are pre-eminent attractors!