Human Interest

When learners can act from their most vital selves, their curiosity emerges. They want to make sense of things and seek out challenges that are in their range of capacities and values. This leads to what human beings experience as interest, the emotional nutrient for a continuing positive attitude toward learning. When we feel interested, we have to make choices about what to do to follow that interest. Such choosing or self-determination involves a sense of feeling free in doing what one has chosen to do, Dessit and Ryan, 1991. For the process of learning thinking, practicing, reading, revising, studying, and other similar activities to be desirable and genuinely enjoyable, adults must see themselves as personally endorsing their own learning.