Transdisciplinary Teaching for Learners with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

Maintaining attention is a learned behaviour influenced by a variety of factors throughout life. The complexity of understanding and defining how attention is developed lies mainly in the fact that attention develops as a result of people’s experiences and feedback received from the environment, and thus, different people develop their attention differently. Furthermore, different cultures have different norms of behaviour and thus may differ in their definitions of what constitutes appropriate attention behaviour in various situations. In other words, one type of behaviour may be perfectly acceptable in one culture but not in another. Nevertheless, for some children, adolescents and adults, focusing on academic development according to society’s requirement to maintain their attention is a barrier that often prevents them from succeeding in schools, in their social life or in any other area of life. Societies’ attitudes to these types of attention challenges also differ one from another, since not all cultures agree upon the need to assess and provide learning accommodations for learners with attention challenges. These cultural differences in perspectives of learning interaction should be also related to by transdisciplinary teachers in intercultural learning communities, a topic discussed in detail later in Chap. 6 of this book.