ABSTRACT
What does “learning desire” mean? Educators often speak of wanting to “instill” the love of learning in their students; we want students to desire learning, to yearn, long, and develop an insatiable appetite for knowledge. In so doing, we express, perhaps inadvertently, the paradoxical notion that desire can be taught and learned and that desire is necessary for learning to occur. As transformative educators, in particular, we are also concerned with developing and engaging a desire to act on our knowledge in order to effect social change. Thus, there is an intangible, ineffable quality to our goal, for the kind of desire we aim to teach is about love, passion, and commitment. This is what constitutes, in part, the unsaid in our educational encounters. We struggle to teach what seems to be the unteachable, the limits of knowability. Indeed, educators acknowledge daily that the scene of education, the scene of learning, is fraught with tensions, pleasures, fears, and ambivalences that are connected to the kind of subject matter being taught, to teacher-student interaction, and to the images and representations that shape how we think about education. So if our goal is to develop the desire for learning and to engage the desire in learning, we must seriously ask ourselves, How do we think about desire? What does it have to do with the affective dimensions connected to learning, particularly transformative learning?
