The tailored practice of hobbies and its implication for the design of interest-driven learning environments

This article seeks to sharpen current conceptualizations of interests and engaged participation, and to derive lessons for the design of interest-driven science learning environments (formal and informal). The empirical basis of the research is a set of ethnographic records of two communities of amateur astronomers, as well as the details of astronomers' instantiations of the hobby. Hobbies are paradigmatic examples of interest-driven practices and thus they offer an excellent window into truly interest-related phenomena and processes. The analysis and data collection followed a grounded theoretical process, which I describe in two parts. First, I comb through the data iteratively and present a theory of persistent engagement in a hobby practice. Based on this theoretical sketch, I then explain how individuals' persistent, interest-based pursuit of amateur astronomy is made possible by 4 structural and process features of the practice, which together afford individuals the ability to continuously tailor the hobby: (a) an extensive and varied material infrastructure; (b) participating simultaneously across multiple communities/sites of astronomy practice; (c) activity structural resources that function as templates for short- and long-term activities; and (d) processes of collaboration and idea sharing. Lessons for the design of science learning environments that are truly interest-driven follow.