About the Program

Putting "attention" at the center of the first-year experience

Funded by a grant from the Teagle Foundation’s Cornerstone program, a group of 14 faculty members from 13 departments at Emory gathered in the summer of 2025 to design a class that would put reading and discussion of transformative texts – defined as works that have made a difference historically and still can today – at the center of an exciting experience for first-year students. We wanted students to get to know one another through reading, and in the process to expand their ideas about how they might get the most out of their learning at Emory and beyond. After several days of discussing books and learning experiences that mattered to each of us, we hit on the idea of “attention” as an organizing principle for the course. Through reading and writing, group activities inside and outside of class, performances, field trips, and social events, we wanted students to practice paying different kinds of attention and to see where that attentiveness might lead.

After piloting the course in Spring 2026, in academic year 2026-27, we are running fourteen sections of a first-year seminar called Attention: Reading, Focusing, and Expanding Your Mind. These will be taught by faculty from a wide range of departments, all with the same reading list – save for a two-week period when each professor will choose works they love to add to the course. 

A curriculum that is more than a reading list 

When we built the syllabus, we were mindful that every society, every spiritual tradition, every field, and every profession has its ways of promoting and directing attention: through prayer or meditation, through political commands, through advertising, through storytelling, through music and the arts, through study, or through parenting. Consulting with our colleagues in disciplines from religion to literature to biology, we constructed a reading list with works from five continents and 2500 years of history to create the widest possible repertoire of ideas about how we might practice paying different kinds of attention and report on those experiences. 

Among the authors we selected are Virginia Woolf, Rabindranath Tagore, W.E.B. Dubois, Sophocles, Lucille Clifton, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Jorge Luis Borges, Seneca, Charles Darwin, and Basho. Then we made videos to share with each other and our students featuring interviews with faculty experts on the texts and traditions we’d chosen. How do you really dissect a poem or a sentence of a modernist writer? How do you observe an earthworm scientifically? How do you notice your own breathing in a way that connects you to wider questions of life and death?   

Then came the fun part: creating bonding experiences for students around the works we are reading. Throughout the semester, students break into small groups to observe their campus and their environment together in the way that one of our authors might, and to share their impressions. They pair up to stare at artworks in the Carlos Museum silently, and then they do the same with a natural object on the quad. They attend a performance of an immersive soundscape, in which they listen intently while blindfolded to a soundtrack that moves from ants marching across an auditorium to city sounds from past and present. They hear from experts in psychology, neuroscience, literature, and media studies on how attention works in the brain and how it is manipulated by outside forces.

Meanwhile, faculty are regularly meeting together to share strategies for teaching upcoming material or for responding to student writing.  And once a semester, students and faculty from all sections get together for a mixer. Through it all, they keep a journal of their own experiences of attending to life and learning, comparing their impressions and memories with what they’re reading and learning about. 

Courses that start conversations 

We hope that by helping students get to know one another (and their professors!) through shared experiences of reading and exploring together, the course will help break down some of the boundaries between the classroom and life in the dorms, clubs, and dining halls. For each student in our seminar, chances are that someone on your hall or at your table will have just read the same thing as you, just experienced the same performance, or even been matched with you on an observational expedition. The conversation you have at the table, we hope, will be even better than the one you had in class. 
 
In the future, we’ll rotate out the theme and the readings every three years or so. And we aim to build more classes for second-year students and beyond to build on the great fun we can have by reading and getting curious together.