– By 2024 Hub Affiliate Helet Botha, Assistant Professor of Business Policy and Strategy
“Attention with effort is all that any case of volition implies. The essential achievement of the will…is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind.” – William James, 1890
In the award-winning film, Everything, Everywhere All At Once, the teenage main character is overwhelmed by choice. Jobu Tupaki (Stephanie Hsu) realizes that whether a decision is a good or a bad one, depends on whose perspective you take. She is overwhelmed by the realization that for centuries has motivated existentialist thinkers: Meaning is undetermined. It has no essence. It varies depending on context. The film brilliantly depicts the nihilist attempt to flee from this reality as a literal dive into the center of a massive, mesmerizing Everything Bagel. The nihilist concludes that since meaning is undetermined, it does not exist. Your choices don’t matter[i].
Jobu Tupaki’s particular, contemporary experience with existential overwhelm is substantially fueled by what I see students doing in my classroom. They scroll, they glance, they open notifications, they check whether someone has checked in. They look at the score of the game, heck, they watch the game! They apply tap-back emojis. They do online shopping. Sometimes they (more admirably?) respond to emails or try to make progress with assignments from other classes. Constant device presence and internet access means that everything is accessible to them, everywhere, all at once. My aim with this write-up is to motivate more conversation around the question of what we are to do, as teachers, about the fact that our students spend significant portions of class time being “digitally distracted”. In some cases, students need a device to participate in class activity, or to access the class materials. In other words, the presence of devices is often unavoidable, and considered conducive to the students’ learning experience. What are we to do and what is our responsibility?
We might say that a student’s “being on their phone” during class time[ii] is their choice, and their responsibility. It is not the teacher’s problem to solve. If a student’s scrolling means that they struggle to make up their understanding later, before the test, that is a fair outcome. But this response makes what is often an invalid assumption: that the individual in question is the only one affected by their digital distraction, i.e. that learning is an individual process. In courses akin to the one I teach on Corporate Responsibility at the College of Business, where classroom activity is designed such that students learn from and with each other to practice their moral voice, one person’s interactions with their devices affects another person’s learning as well. The research on “phubbing” is a rich resource on how one person’s engagement with a smart phone in an in-person conversation affects the other person’s experience and potential for learning from that conversation. The term “phubbing” is a portmanteau of “phone” and “snubbing,” which refers to the act of ignoring someone in favor of using one’s smartphone.
Conversing with someone who is on their phone means that the quality of the conversation is perceived as worse, and the relationship is perceived as weak. Trust between the involved parties is diminished. The importance of relationships for college students’ success has been well established[iii] – relationships between students, as well as relationships between teachers and students. Indeed, shortly before I posted this piece, Associate Dean at the College of Business here at UM-Dearborn, Dr. Lee Freeman, reminded all COB faculty of how important it is to work on building relationships with students. All learning requires paying attention; learning about others’ perspective on ethical issues (as is the case in the course I teach) requires attending to others, being attended to by others, and attending together. Thus, to the extent that I am charged with facilitating learning, I feel some responsibility to take some sort of stance on digital distraction.
This sense of responsibility I feel as a teacher is complicated by the fact that my classroom is certainly not the only setting in which students are digitally distracted. Students interact with their phones in ways that are not conducive to course-related learning in most or all of their classes. They also interact with their phones while they drive, work and go about their morning hygiene routine. We, the teachers, also interact with our devices unthinkingly in many settings. Our students are part of a mainstream culture in which “phubbing” is normalized despite its negative effects on relationships. Counter-intuitively, as I acknowledge that this phenomenon reaches far beyond my classroom, I feel my responsibility more acutely. I imagine how dramatically our students are being shaped by ever-present distraction. Evoking William James quoted at the top of this piece, as individuals, our capacity to willfully direct our attention is our most basic form of freedom. Indeed, our attentive abilities are key in shielding us from nihilism and despair because they are the vehicle through which we stick to a worthwhile project amid trying societal and personal circumstances. If I don’t take a stance on how students interact with their devices during our class time, thereby signaling my awareness and concern, I am not simply failing them as a teacher within my specific field. I am failing them in a more profound way because I am standing by as they fail to realize that compulsively interacting with their phones over time damages their ability to live in accordance with their “will”.
(MS Am 1092 (1185), Houghton Library, Harvard University)
While I feel convinced that I need to take a stance, I do not know what that stance can or should entail. In my course, we utilize Google Slides, and students are required to complete a short writing assignment on Canvas during most of our sessions. Thus, there are good reasons for electronic devices to be present. Removing them wholesale does not seem feasible in my case. My uncertainty motivated me to turn to scholarship as well as to do a systematic survey of what is being done in our own community here at UM-Dearborn. Studies have shown that the mere presence of a smart phone has a negative effect on working memory; that students are not capable of self-regulating interaction with their devices; that laptop bans do not improve students’ performance but that it may weaken attendance; and that smartphones and social media are more clearly detrimental than laptops. So:
- What should my syllabus say?
- How should I react when I observe students interacting with their devices in a way that is unrelated to the course?
- Are there ways to establish classroom norms around device interaction whereby trust between teacher and students is strengthened, rather than them experiencing me as an autocrat and a luddite?
- How should I interact with my own devices during class sessions?!
To help us develop high quality answers to (at least some of) these questions – answers that resonate with our community in particular – we will invite faculty to participate in an exploratory survey in the Winter of 2025. When the moment comes, please consider donating some of your valuable time to the radical cause of resisting the tyranny of the everything bagel! Our idea is to organize a gathering via zoom once our data has been collected and analyzed. Everyone – also members of the educational community outside of UM-Dearborn – will be welcome. Once a date has been set, we will communicate it through the Hub blog, and other channels on our campus.
[i] Without giving too much away, the film also explores an alternative response, namely that meaning does exist as long as we work to create it with others.
[ii] Note that from now on I refer specifically to using a device in a way that is not conducive to the students’ engagement with the course content, i.e. they are digitally distracted rather than their engagement with the course content being digitally supported. .
[iii] See: Felten, P., & Lambert, L. M. (2020). Relationship-rich education: How human connections drive success in college. Jhu Press; Miranda Tapia, O. R., Artze-Vega, I., Lambert, L. M., & Felten, P. (2023). Connections Are Everything: A College Student’s Guide to Relationship-Rich Education. Johns Hopkins University Press;