Pausing in wonder

Disrupting the invasion of 'digital stupor' in the classroom

Abstract

We are living in a time in which a sense of “digital stupor” – a sensation of “permanent electrocution” – has infiltrated our bodies and souls. It is from within the bowels of this destructive force, which permeates and overwhelms education and educators today, that I respond to Mario Di Paolantonio and Anders Schinkel’s provocation to consider the ‘educational potential of wonder’. I draw on Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Bracha Ettinger and Mark Fisher’s work to explore the ways in which the digital sphere institutes a crisis of attention and impedes students’ desires and abilities to pause and take time to wonder. How might educators disrupt the sense of stupor produced by the infectious magnetism of ‘the screen’? How might educators slow down time in classrooms to interrupt the frenzied pace of the digital sphere and mediate a sense of wonder that draws attention to the world not away from it? I conclude by invoking Di Paolantonio’s conceptualization of “passing time together” with an object in common as a way in which educators might mediate wonder in education, and interrupt the pull of the screen, if only for a fleeting moment.