“How am I Supposed to Watch a Little Piece of Paper?” Literacy and Learning Under Duress - Carrie Hall

Oct 15, 2026

The text examines how literacy learning suffers under extreme duress, arguing that attention is limited and unevenly distributed by cultural forces rather than individual preference or pure neuroscience. It reviews research and student writing from crises to show how writing instructors can design curricula that leverage strengths developed under pressure, such as urgency and heightened awareness. Using an anecdote about a student unable to concentrate on reading, it connects boredom, distraction, and attention economics to social power, proposing equitable teaching attentive to students’ attentional realities during and beyond the pandemic.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages18

Reading Time45 min

AccessFree to download

Literacy learning under duress

Attention as a limited, socially shaped resource

Curriculum design for writers under pressure

The economics and politics of attention

“How am I Supposed to Watch a Little Piece of Paper?” Literacy and Learning Under Duress Carrie Hall The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the troubling fact that many students struggle to pay attention to literacy learning while they are in situations of extreme duress. This duress did not begin with pandemic, nor will it end with it. Neither is duress distributed at random; those negatively affected by the nation’s prejudices, as a general rule, are under more duress than those who reap the benefits of these systems. To achieve an equitable curriculum, we must teach with the attentional needs of those under duress in mind. This article explores how writing instructors can develop curricula that work with these needs. It looks at research on learning under duress as well as student work that was written in crisis, building upon the strengths of those under duress (who often, for example, write with a sense of urgency and keen awareness of their immediate surroundings) instead of trying to“cure” what we may perceive as weaknesses. A curriculum that speaks to the strengths of students with these experiences will be vital both during the pandemic and beyond it.1 The first time one of my students called a reading “boring” in a class I taught, I asked the whole class, as I often do, what makes a reading boring. I got many of the responses I usually get: students describing being forced to read texts that they felt had nothing to do with them or just wanting to do something else. But then I got a response I had never heard before. Ray, a young man on a football scholarship who had grown up around a great deal of violence, said,“How am I supposed to watch a little piece of paper when I’m worried someone might be coming at me?” This response has stuck with me for a number of reasons: first of all, of course, because of the violence implicit in it and also because of my own naivete: though it’s obvious, it had never crossed my mind that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to concentrate on “a little piece of paper” if one had to be hypervigilant of one’s surroundings. It also clarified for me the idea of attention as a limited resource, and a resource whose distribution is not just a matter of personal preference or neurological capacity, but which is learned, taught, and demanded by forces which are often out of our control. In his 1994 address,“The Economics of Attention,” rhetorician Richard Lanham claimed: “if one is looking for a glimpse of what literacy will look Composition Studies 49.3 (2021): 56–73 like in the future, the fighter cockpit is a good place to look” (Lanham) . In other words, he predicted that literacy acts would involve the fending off of numerous distractions and require an increasing amount of attentional skill in order for the reader to remain focused on the task at hand.2 In his address, Lanham suggested that we were facing, “not a population explosion, but a document explosion,” which would lead to a new scarcity, the scarcity of “the human attention needed to make sense of information.” I don’t think we can look at how an individual inside a fighter cockpit behaves without looking at the factors that placed them in a fighter jet in the first place. In other words, just as the study of economics is much more than the study of how one individual distributes the pennies in their piggy bank, so should the study of the economics of attention be the study of more than how each individual distributes their kernels of attention among the many possible attractors ofthat attention. And yet, the discussion of literacy and attentional economics is often just that: how does an individual slog through the endless information they are faced with? How does a person parse through all the articles on the internet? My point here is that attention is not a purely physiological or personal impulse, but also a social one; we learn to pay attention (or to act like we’re paying attention;) we learn what ways

FAQs

Why does the article argue that students struggle with literacy learning under duress?

It argues that extreme strain changes attentional functioning, making sustained focus on reading difficult. It also emphasizes that duress is patterned by cultural biases rather than randomly assigned.

How does the curriculum approach proposed in the text differ from trying to “cure” weaknesses?

It emphasizes building curricula around students’ strengths developed under pressure, such as urgency and acute awareness of immediate surroundings, instead of treating attentional responses as deficits to fix.

What is the role of attention economics in the article’s argument?

The text draws on Richard Lanham’s view that literacy involves resisting distractions, requiring increasing attentional skill. It uses this to support the idea that attention is constrained and affected by social conditions, not only physiology.

Oct 15, 2026

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