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The Tailored Practice of

Hobbies and Its Implication for
the Design of Interest-Driven
Learning Environments
a
Flávio S. Azevedo
a
Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies ,
University of Massachusetts , Amherst
Accepted author version posted online: 24 Sep
2012.Published online: 19 Nov 2012.
To cite this article: Flávio S. Azevedo (2013) The Tailored Practice of Hobbies and Its
Implication for the Design of Interest-Driven Learning Environments, Journal of the
Learning Sciences, 22:3, 462-510, DOI: 10.1080/10508406.2012.730082
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THE JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES, 22: 462–510, 2013
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1050-8406 print / 1532-7809 online
DOI: 10.1080/10508406.2012.730082
LEARNING OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL STRAND
The Tailored Practice of Hobbies and Its

Implication for the Design of Interest-Driven
Learning Environments
Flávio S. Azevedo
Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
This article seeks to sharpen current conceptualizations of interests and engaged

participation, and to derive lessons for the design of interest-driven science learn-
ing 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 fol-
lowed 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’ persis-
tent, 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.
Correspondence should be addressed to Flávio S. Azevedo, Teacher Education and Curriculum

Studies, School of Education, 105 Furcolo Hall, University of Massachusetts, 813 North Pleasant
Street, Amherst, MA 01003-9308. E-mail: flavio@educ.umass.edu
THE TAILORED PRACTICE OF HOBBIES 463
This article has twin pragmatic and theoretical goals. Pragmatically speaking, I
seek to contribute to the design of interest-based instruction, with an empha-
sis on science learning in and out of schools. In the long run, my goal is to
distill lessons and principles for the design of learning environments (Brown &
Campione, 1996; Collins, 1995; Friedman & diSessa, 1999; Walker, Pressick-
Kilborn, Arnold, & Sainsbury, 2004), in particular those that lead to engaged
forms of participation (Azevedo, 2006; Engle & Conant, 2002; Greeno & the
Middle School Mathematics Through Applications Project Group, 1998). The
work reported here is a step in this direction.
My theoretical goal is to help sharpen current conceptualizations of interests
(Hidi & Renninger, 2006) and engaged participation (Greeno et al., 1998).
As observed by Weiner (1990), research on motivational phenomena as a whole
has focused almost exclusively on achievement contexts, which has led to
theorizing that lacks generality and nuance. My aim is to revisit the very nature of
interests, short and long term, and to develop a new theoretical lens for capturing
and understanding interest-based participation in social practices. It is based on
this new theoretical lens that I derive lessons for the design of engaging classroom
activities.
Heeding Weiner’s (1990) observation, my approach to these goals is to investi-
gate people’s extended participation in the hobby of amateur astronomy. Hobbies
are paradigmatic examples of interest-based practices and pursuits, and thus
they offer an excellent window into truly interest-related phenomena and pro-
cesses (Azevedo, 2011; Barron, 2006; diSessa, 2000; Hidi & Renninger, 2006;
Krapp, 2003; National Research Council, 2009; Valsiner, 1992). By stepping out
of classrooms, I hope to illuminate key dimensions of “purely” interest-driven
pursuits—dimensions that might be hidden or lost in contexts (e.g., schools) where
the need to engineer highly specific forms of learning is a primary, and often
the sole, concern (Hall & Stevens, 1995). As I show, empirically one observes
that hobbyists fashion themselves highly tailored versions of the practice. The
astronomers I met in the fields could certainly be said to be engaged in, and
committed to, amateur astronomy, but each with distinct foci, for different rea-
sons and motives (often extending much beyond the hobby), at a distinct pace
and distinct places, and so on. The theory I develop captures patterns in hobby-
ists’ idiosyncratic (i.e., tailored) pursuits and explains these patterns in terms of
sustained processes and structural features of the interactions between partici-
pants and the various contexts of practice in which they find themselves. As we
will see, when contrasted to extant theorizing on the matter, the theory I put for-
ward leads to some overlapping but also distinct recommendations for the design
of science and mathematics classroom activities that are genuinely interest cen-
tered. Comparing and contrasting the entailments of these different theories is
therefore a central strategy I pursue when articulating the pragmatic goals of the
article.
464 AZEVEDO
BACKGROUND
As used here, interest-based engagement in a practice refers to self-motivated,

often self-guided, short- and long-term participation in the fabric of activities that
make up the practice (diSessa, 2000). Framed in this manner, a broad variety of
research literature can be seen to bear on my study. To begin, educational psy-
chologists have long theorized about short- and long-term interests and sought to
capitalize on these for instructional purposes (for a review, see Krapp, Hidi, &
Renninger, 1992; Schraw & Lehman, 2001). Situational interests refers to the
somewhat fleeting engagement that is sparked by one or more features of the
task environment (Boekaerts & Boscolo, 2002; Schiefele, 2009). For example,
research on text-based instruction has found that text features such as seductive
details, vivid passages, and overall coherence differentially affect how various
readers direct their attention and consequent processing of a text. Thus, whereas
the vividness of text passages attracts people’s attention to and engagement with
key parts of the text, seductive details may draw people into marginal subtopics
and away from the main ideas in the text. Designing engaging text-based instruc-
tion, then, requires cataloguing a variety of situationally interesting features of
expository language and using these as guidelines for crafting topic-specific
instructional texts (say, the science of chameleons or X-rays; Ainley, Hidi, &
Berndorff, 2002).
An individual or personal interest, in contrast, refers to a person’s long-term
disposition to engage a topic or domain—such as world history, the physics of
motion, or sports—and is usually associated with high knowledge and high value
of such a topic/domain (Hidi & Renninger, 2006; Hidi, Renninger, & Krapp,
2004; Renninger, 1992; Silvia, 2001, 2006). Once involved in an activity on world
history, for example, the history buff tends to seek out additional information
on the subject, to persist in the activity in spite of unforeseen hurdles, to ask
more curiosity questions, and to learn a good deal from these experiences (del
Favero, Boscolo, Vidotto, & Vicentini, 2007). To design instruction for long-term,
interest-based engagement, therefore, one begins by surveying students’ broad
topics of interests and then uses such topics to anchor learning activities (Hoffman,
2002; Renninger, Ewen, & Lasher, 2002). In addition, because individual inter-
ests are seen as a relationship between the person and the environment—including
interest objects, activities, and topic-specific ideas (Krapp, 2003; Prenzel, 1992)—
providing favorable conditions for individuals’ interests to take hold and develop
is a central concern of instructional design. Ensuring support from peers and
instructor as well as allowing students to plan and execute aspects of learning
activities are often cited as some such key elements (Hidi et al., 2004).
In line with these ideas, other contemporary approaches to designing student-
centered, engaging learning experiences also acknowledge the multidimensional
nature of engaged participation. In what may be called a common learning

sciences approach, for example, persistent and cognitively meaningful involve-
ment in classroom activities is seen to result from various simultaneous factors,
such as students’ ability to express their interest in the activities, their feel-
ings of competence and relatedness, and their sense of autonomy and agency
(Blumenfeld, Kempler, & Krajcik, 2006). Activities designed around problem-,
project-, and inquiry-based learning principles are said to prototypically embody
such qualities, though their complexity and protracted nature pose hurdles that
may damper students’ ability to participate in these activities (Blumenfeld et al.,
1992).
By adding process details to these accounts, researchers taking a more explic-
itly interactionist approach have characterized student engagement as emerging
from the ongoing transactions between students, teacher, and the larger class-
room environment (e.g., McInerney, Walker, & Liem, 2011), including the tools
available to participants (Pea, 1991), the norms and values of the classroom (e.g.,
McClain & Cobb, 2001), the organization of the activity (group and/or individual
work), and so on. Given this understanding of student engagement as reflex-
ive of social and historical conditions, then, in this approach the instructional
design focus is put squarely on developing a classroom practice in which par-
ticipants (students and teacher alike) see themselves as a community that shares
the endeavor of learning a discipline.
As an illustration, Engle and Conant (2002) reported on a study of fifth-grade
students who productively engaged in an extended unit on the biology of endan-
gered species. By attending to the cumulative history of the activity, Engle and
Conant were able to single out several moments in which a group of students
investigating orcas (i.e., killer whales) became strongly involved in arguments
about the classification of the species (i.e., whether orcas were indeed whales or
dolphins)—an issue that was tangential to the problem of exploring the future
prospects of orcas, but which emerged as relevant for students. During these
discussions, students engaged in a variety of disciplinary-like forms of argumen-
tation (e.g., backing up arguments with evidence and raising counter-arguments to
others’ positions), in addition to the more central content of the unit. In explaining
the activity dynamics they observed, Engle and Conant posed that engaged forms
of student participation are critically dependent on classroom sociocultural norms
and activity structures that: (1) give students leeway to problematize the content of
lessons; (2) devolve authority to students; (3) hold students accountable to others
and to disciplinary norms; and (4) provide relevant resources (e.g., extended time
for investigation).
Convergent arguments regarding the emergent nature of student engage-
ment have appeared in a number of additional studies (e.g., Azevedo, 2006;
Gresalfi, 2009; Nolen, 2007; Pressick-Kilborn & Walker, 2004). For instance,
466 AZEVEDO
Pressick-Kilborn and Walker (2004) documented how a fifth-grade science

student (Michaela) who consistently claimed to dislike science eventually became
interested in an activity that required design and group work. As it turns out,
Michaela chose to implement an electric torch, though she had previously declared
that electricity was boring. As the authors reported, Michaela’s newfound interest
seemed to emerge from the character of the activity and, critically, from the activ-
ity’s alignment with goals she nurtured outside schooling (i.e., building an electric
torch, which she planned to use in a Dads and Daughters camping trip). Toward
that end, Michaela even took the task home and engaged her father in rehearsing
the assembly of the artifact.
Similarly, Azevedo (2006) reported on case studies in which students displayed
a high degree of engagement while working on computer-based, scientific image-
processing activities. By attending to moments of intense student engagement,
Azevedo (2006) found that while working on proposed activities students spo-
radically and opportunistically took detours to pursue emergent interests. Such
detours, which he called “personal excursions,” afforded students the means to
forge deeply personal connections to classroom activities and thus served as
strong motivators for students’ continuous pursuits. As with Engle and Conant’s
(2002) case, Azevedo (2006) showed that student engagement was critically
dependent upon a material infrastructure that allowed students to tailor activities
to their interests, as well as upon students having time to pursue both self-initiated
detours and the activity-as-set.
I return to these ideas throughout the article, in particular when I consider the
pedagogical implications of the theory I develop here.
THE ORGANIZATION OF THE ARTICLE
The article is organized as follows. In the next section, I present the theoreti-
cal framework guiding my investigation. Following that, I begin considering my
research methods, which are further elaborated in two subsequent sections. I then
present some ethnographic data on the functioning of amateur astronomy com-
munities as well as on individual astronomers’ instantiation of the hobby. This
provides a critical background for the analyses that follow, which are done in
two parts: (a) first, I comb through the data iteratively and present a theory of
interest-driven participation in a practice; (b) second, based on this theoretical
sketch, I explain how individuals’ persistent, interest-based pursuit of a practice
is made possible by some of its structural and process features. Finally, based on
these analyses, I discuss some lessons for the design of (formal and informal) sci-
ence and mathematics learning environments that foster and sustain individuals’
interest-based participation. Brief conclusions follow.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Addressing my research goals entails explaining the varieties of individual hobby

practice—that is, the singularities or idiosyncrasies of each hobbyist’s short- and
long-term pursuits—as well as the common elements cutting across and underly-
ing various hobbyists’ pursuits. This calls for a theoretical framework that blends
insights from sociocultural theories of learning and interest psychology, both of
which we began considering earlier.
I take it as fundamental that individual engagement emerges from interactions
between the person and the environment (Engle & Conant, 2002; Greeno et al.,
1998; Hidi & Renninger, 2006; Krapp, 2003; Lave & Wenger, 1991). In prac-
tice participation, for example, several processes have been described to capture
regularities in these interactions (i.e., how a practice systematically affords and
constrains the ways in which a person engages it across time; e.g., Greeno,
2006; Norman, 1993, pp. 106–113). In the now-classic work of Lave and Wenger
(1991; Wenger, 1998), legitimate peripheral participation describes a mechanism
whereby newcomers to a community of practice constantly move between periph-
eral and more central forms of participation. Center and periphery do not refer
to physical locales but rather to relations of production and accountability crucial
for the community’s functioning. Learning, therefore, is seen in the different roles
that a newcomer progressively takes on, in the process becoming accountable to
more central aspects of the practice.
Take the case of Vai and Gola tailors in Liberia (Lave & Wenger, 1991,
pp. 69–72). Individuals entering communities of tailors are apprenticed into the
practice through a process that guarantees their continued access to resources in
the community (which is critical for the newcomer’s performing of any task), as
well as an overall understanding of the process of garment production, starting
with the finished products. As newcomers are assisted by more capable peers in
working with various aspects of garment making, they take on new responsibil-
ities in the production process and develop into more mature forms of practice
participation.
In a related vein, Rogoff, Paradise, Arauz, Correa-Chávez, and Angelillo
(2003) described a particular form of practice participation that they termed
“intent.” Intent participation refers to a person’s close observation of and/or lis-
tening in on activities in anticipation of active involvement in collective endeavors.
In particular, in communities in which youngsters are not segregated from adult
activities, children are often expected to contribute to these activities and to take
on progressively more complex roles in their execution.
At the core of these studies—and indeed many more in this tradition (e.g.,
Nasir, 2002)—is the idea that practice participation results partly from the sense
of future that the community imparts to its members. Thus, for a 9-year-old
468 AZEVEDO
Guatemalan child who routinely joins his or her parents in their agricultural work
(Rogoff et al., 2003, p. 192), continued and purposeful observation of such work,
and eventual direct participation in it, follows from the child’s identification with
family and community and his or her ongoing commitment to these.
These observations have clear implications for my study. Specifically, the way
in which any single hobbyist participates in a community of amateur astronomers
should somehow reflect the person’s understanding of his or her ongoing and
future relationship to the community and its members, as well as his or her motives
for engaging the practice in the long run. The challenge here is to understand how
each hobbyist goes about doing this, given the significant leeway hobbyists have in
shaping the content, goals, means, and pace of their activities. For instance, some
hobbyists may put some effort on receiving recognition for their observational
achievements (say, by getting awards from astronomical societies), whereas oth-
ers may never consider such an option. Some may nurture a relatively narrow set
of observational targets and goals, whereas others may be more eclectic in their
practice foci. It is in accounting for both variety and commonality across hobby-
ists’ practices that one begins to explain how such variety becomes possible in the
first place (Becker, 1998).
Also running through the arguments in Lave and Wenger (1991) and Rogoff
et al. (2003), and originating in Vygotsky’s (1978) work (Leont’ev, 1995;
Scribner, 1985), is the central role of mediational means in shaping the very
nature of one’s practice, affording some while constraining other opportunities
for growth and development in the practice. Similarly, following activity theory
(e.g., Engeström, 1999; Nardi, 1996; Wertsch, 1981, 1985) and distributed frames
of cognition (Hutchins, 1995, 1998), norms and values of practice in different
communities of amateur astronomers, as well as the division of labor in such com-
munities (e.g., Stevens, 2000), create the conditions for and shape individuals’
forms of participation.
Tools, artifacts, and materials in general are just as critical mediational means
and have received great attention in studies of learning and development that
tie such processes to culture and society (e.g., Saxe, 1992, 2002). Conveniently,
tools and artifacts are highly prominent in technoscientific practices (Hall, 1999;
Latour & Woolgar, 1986), and presumably in amateur astronomy as well, and
thus provide a tangible way for tracing a hobbyist’s motivations for engaging
the practice in the short and long run. Elaborating the nature of tools/artifacts
available in the hobby and their role in shaping interest-based engagement
is one of the contributions of this work.
Beyond attending to the material means through which astronomers fashion
their practices, it is important to highlight the materiality of people’s goals as
expressed in the physical (e.g., a planet) and conceptual (e.g., observational skills)
objects that themselves become central targets of long-term practice participation.
This focus on the material goals in hobbyists’ persistent engagement follows from
the observation that long-term interest relationships cluster around specific mate-
rial forms of primary concern to the person. Indeed, in person–object theories of
individual interests (Fink, 1991; Krapp, 2002, 2003; Krapp & Fink, 1992) interest
objects are regarded as primary sources of energy in topic-centered engagement
(Hidi, 2006; Hidi & Renninger, 2006). For instance, a child who has an individual
interest in dinosaurs may have stuffed dinosaurs and books on the subject as pri-
mary interest objects, as seen in his or her long-term patterns of engagement with
many potential such objects.
Finally, a central commitment of the article is that human behavior is best
understood through the charting of how it develops over time (e.g., Cole, 1996;
Saxe, 1992, 1999; Vygotsky, 1978). With regard to interest-driven activities in
particular, Barron (2006) described a learning ecologies framework in which
topic-centered interests are seen to develop in reflexive relationship to ideational,
material, social, and identity resources. A learning ecology describes a system of
people, practices, technologies, and values in a local environment, and individu-
als typically participate in multiple such ecologies across time. The framework
highlights how people actively create learning opportunities for themselves as
they strive to pursue their evolving interests (in this case, in technological mat-
ters), in the process crossing boundaries of several settings (e.g., school, home,
and after-school programs). As we will see, tracking how individual hobbyists’
practices change over time is one of the methodological/analytical strategies
to inferring the immutable/persistent aspects of people’s short- and long-term
practice, which therefore are central to both a structural and process account of
engaged participation.
RESEARCH CONTEXT AND METHODS
Starting tentatively in 2000 and intensifying in 2002 and 2003, I documented

the activities of two communities of amateur astronomers and the specifics of
individual participants’ activities in and beyond these communities. As a first
step, I searched for amateur astronomy clubs within reasonable driving distance
from where I lived in Northern California and randomly chose the South Bay
Astronomers club for a visit.1
In June 2000 I attended a business meeting of the South Bay Astronomers
club—that is, a gathering at which club members socialized, shared ideas on
recent activities (e.g., home observations) and readings, planned future observa-
tional trips, and so on. The meetings also included a talk delivered by researchers
from nearby universities or research labs. I stayed until the end of the event
and managed to arrange interviews with Paula and Burton, both adults in their
1 Names of study participants, astronomy clubs, and their meeting sites are pseudonyms.
470 AZEVEDO
60s, long-time practitioners of the hobby and mutual acquaintances in the club.
In the following months, I visited each for an audiotaped conversation that lasted
between 1 and 2 hr. For a brief period, I also exchanged e-mail messages with
Paula that updated me on her latest hobby-related activities, but changes in the
project eventually severed our communication.

As I did with most every amateur astronomer I would later meet in the fields
of practice, I conversed with Paula and Burton about a variety of topics within
and beyond astronomy, but eventually I invited them to narrate their histories
of involvement with the hobby. Overall, these interviews led to some initial
insights into people’s patterns of practice participation, but it was clear that Paula
and Burton were essentially inactive in terms of observational practice. Indeed,
the South Bay Astronomers club had no fixed site for collective observations,
and on their rare outings practitioners tended to gather at some well known
but distant observational site. This severely limited my ability to document the
more dynamic aspects of a hobbyist’s practice, such as the manifestation of the
astronomers’ goals in activity and how these goals are intertwined with the forms
of participation afforded by the community (e.g., Saxe, 1992).
Faced with these initial difficulties, for some time I focused on looking more
carefully at Paula’s and Burton’s interviews and temporarily suspended visits
to astronomy sites or events. I resumed data collection efforts in 2001, and in
September of that year I attended and observed the Mt Hillview event of another
local astronomy association—the Amateur Astronomy Club (AAC). Astronomy
clubs suspend their observational activities during the winter months, so I returned
again to AAC’s Mt Hillview event in April 2002. At that point, given a number of
practical reasons (e.g., long and late observing hours, cold temperature, and rela-
tive distance to practice sites) I settled on a data collection schedule centered on
a few, focused, and extended data collection efforts with astronomy communities
that kept an active observational practice. My initial visits to AAC confirmed that
the community was very active in various aspects of astronomy and that the group
met on a regular basis. The visits also served as an introduction to many of the
group’s essential routines, organization, and dynamics, all of which I recorded in
field notes.
Field data collection then intensified. In the AAC Mt Hillview event of July
13, 2002, I recruited Sally and Mitchell to participate in the study and began doc-
umenting their activities that same night. In the following few months, I visited
Mt Hillview events three times (on September 7, 2002, September 28, 2002, and
September 27, 2003), for about 5 to 6 hr of observation each night/event. Once
I followed Mitchell and Sally to Lake Countryside (October 5, 2002), a site they
visit a few times a year, as we will see in detail. In addition, I visited Mitchell at
his home for two focused interviews that lasted about 80 min each (February 2,
2003 and October 23, 2003).
My research design called for an in-depth case study of extended, individual

astronomy practice (either Sally or Mitchell) to be selectively compared and con-
trasted with the practices of other astronomers in the field (Becker, 1998; Harper,
1992). In addition, because Mitchell, Sally, and others practiced the hobby across
many different sites, sites of practice themselves became a case, to be developed in

reflexive relation to individual practice cases. In this manner, I hoped to document
idiosyncratic and shared forms of participation within the larger space of prac-
tice made available by the hobby as a whole. Because Sally returned to her home
country immediately after the Lake Countryside event and Mitchell turned out to
be an excellent informant and participant, Mitchell became the individual focus
case of the study.2 Many other amateur astronomers are introduced as contrasting
cases throughout the article.
My data collection procedures followed closely the participant–observer tra-
dition of ethnography (Emerson, 2001; Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995). As a
participant in the practice of amateur astronomy, I became a member of AAC for
a year, a period in which I met many of its members, looked through people’s
scopes, and talked about astronomy and beyond. I also read astronomy maga-
zines, books, and websites, although I never bought a telescope. As an observer, I
documented community and individuals’ activities in videotapes and field notes.
Here, membership in the group was crucial in that it allowed me to participate
in extended collective and private observational hours that the general public at
astronomy events could not experience.
Toward the end of the study, videotaped interviews with Mitchell provided for
an intimate understanding of how amateur astronomy meshed with his daily life,
work, neighborhood community, and friendships and served to deepen my under-
standing of my observations of his field practice. At the beginning of the study,
I also visited a store specializing in optical equipment that is well known in the
area among astronomers. While at the store I took notes on the kinds of equip-
ment offered to clients (e.g., different types of telescopes, books, and electronic
gadgets), as well as some customer/staff interactions. In all, I collected nearly
9 hr of video data and 2 hr of audiotapes, about 20 pages of field notes, and some
100 pages of (typed and handwritten) annotations and reflections on these data
(i.e., analytical and theoretical memos).
Finally, whenever possible I collected any artifacts that astronomers produced
as part of their practice. Chief among these was Mitchell’s extensive set of astron-
omy notes—three notebooks totaling some 300 pages of detailed annotations of
2 I did exchange a few e-mail messages with Sally after her departure, and that allowed me to very
roughly follow how her practice developed in the upcoming months. Her last message to me was dated
August 27, 2003.
472 AZEVEDO
observational and personal character, all of which he graciously allowed me to

photocopy. The notebooks covered a time period stretching from May 31, 1996 to
June 22, 1996, then continuously from July 5, 2000 to September 27, 2003—that
is, time periods that preceded, as well as overlapped with, the study period and that
therefore provided evidence central to triangulating and/or confirming analytical

inferences.
My analytical procedures draw centrally from grounded theoretical methodol-
ogy (Charmaz, 1990, 2001; Harry, Sturges, & Klingner, 2005; Strauss & Corbin,
1994). In a nutshell, grounded theory outlines a method for the systematic
development of substantive theory through a process of iterative data collection,
analysis, and write-ups. At the core of the method is a process of constant com-
parison whereby emergent analytical categories are tested and refined (perhaps
confirmed or rejected) in subsequent data collection. The process works induc-
tively, and the resulting, stable conceptual categories must cover the whole data
corpus.
Pragmatically speaking, I began by logging the contents of videos and field
notes after each data collection session. The logs described activities at the indi-
vidual, interpersonal, and community planes of activity (Rogoff, 1995, 1997).
As analysis and data collection proceeded, I transcribed parts of these records so
as to further scrutinize, test, and saturate existing conceptual categories (Charmaz,
1990). I processed Mitchell’s notebooks in a similar fashion, not by coding and
counting a set of prespecified conceptual categories but rather by inductively
distilling categories that adequately accounted for the existing data corpus. In par-
ticular, because I had access to Mitchell’s notebooks only at the end of the
ethnographic period, the coding of this written corpus provided for a strong test of
the conceptual categories that had long been refined. Indeed, the notebooks pro-
vided an extremely rich record of his activities in, around, and beyond the hobby,
as well as how these activities evolved over the years, and eliminated the need for
further data collection.
In an upcoming section, I consider this grounded theoretical process in detail.
Before doing so, however, I present some baseline data on the functioning of ama-
teur astronomy communities, as well as on Mitchell’s and others’ instantiation of
the amateur astronomy practice. These data narratives present a composite image
of collective and personal aspects of amateur astronomy (i.e., a stitching together
of various moments of practice taken from across the full ethnographic period
that therefore presents a coherent whole of individual and community practices).
Because of their composite character, these narratives anticipate many (but not
all) themes that are central in the subsequent analysis but that are then revealed in
the piecewise, iterative, and inductive manner of the grounded theoretical process.
In the analysis, I also introduce much additional data that contribute details to this
initial picture of the hobby.
THE COLLECTIVE PRACTICE OF AMATEUR ASTRONOMY
I followed amateur astronomers’ collective practice at two physical sites, both

of which were located within the premises of state parks and away from urban
areas and therefore offered excellent observing conditions. As we have seen, the
first site—Mt Hillview—is where AAC held its main monthly event, twice every
month, always on alternate Saturdays. AAC is a large, well-managed organization
with hundreds of members, a strong online presence, and a full yearly calendar of
varied events (e.g., lectures, business meetings, outreach efforts, field trips, and,
of course, regular observing practice). Any AAC Mt Hillview event had between
20 and 35 astronomers in attendance.
The second site I visited was Lake Countryside, a farther drive than Mt
Hillview. Events at the lake were not sponsored by any astronomy association;
instead, the place was visited on an opportunistic basis by astronomers from the
larger geographical area. Gatherings at Lake Countryside had no set date or time
either. Rather, practitioners used a website to post their intention to observe from
the site and thus sought to attract others for the night. The site’s highly isolated
nature lent itself to undisturbed personal practice and attracted a large number of
practitioners, from both AAC and beyond.
By and large, members of AAC and participants at Lake Countryside were
mature adults, though a few youth could be found among them. (Note that this
contrasts with the public that attended these events, which tended to include many
youngsters.) About 35% of amateur astronomers at AAC and Lake Countryside
were women.
A Typical Night in the Field

Astronomers attending events at Mt Hillview arrived at the site while there was
still some daylight, which made it easier for them to set up their telescopes. Upon
arrival, they parked their cars in the parking lot, which doubles as an observation
site, and set up their telescopes next to their cars. This procedure resulted in a
rectangular ring of telescopes with a large central area open for people’s transit
(see Figure 1). After dark, attendees were reminded to never turn on any car lights
or portable flashlights, except those properly fit with a red filter.
Events at Mt Hillview were a combination of public lecture, star party, and per-
sonal observing practice. The events started around 8:30 p.m. with a lecture held
in an amphitheater near the parking lot. These lectures were delivered by profes-
sionals in the field, and they ran the gamut of astronomy-related topics, oftentimes
beyond observational practice (say, the possibility of life on other planets, as in
Mt Hillview, September 7, 2002). The lectures lasted about an hour, after which
attendees mingled with amateur astronomers in the observation area and looked
through their scopes. This constituted the star party part of the event—essentially,
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FIGURE 1 A schema of the Mt Hillview observation site (color figure available online).
an outreach effort that is replicated by several amateur astronomy associations

across the country.
Star parties at Mt Hillview were quite lively. Visitors attended in large num-
bers and tended to engage astronomers in lengthy explanations. The liveliness of
the star party portion of Mt Hillview events was enhanced by the contrasts in
the astronomers’ style of interaction with the public: Some limited themselves to
answering people’s questions in a private manner, whereas others delivered lec-
tures out loud. Indeed, some club members had developed a practice that focused
solely on engaging large groups of attendees in “lessons” on the basics of astron-
omy, celestial way finding, and so on. Such was the case of Chuck, a veteran
amateur astronomer who carried a laser pointer and commanded the attention of
large crowds for extended periods of time (Mt Hillview, September 7, 2002).
At 11 p.m. the general public was required to leave the premises of the park
in which Mt Hillview is located. From that point until about 3 a.m., astronomers
dedicated themselves to personal projects. Personal pursuits ran for more or less
time depending on the practitioners’ style and the events taking place around them.
For instance, as the night unfolded astronomers took breaks to warm up with a
cup of hot chocolate and to enjoy the good company of friends. During this time,
conversations flowed freely between various topics and, naturally, astronomy.
Breaks in the people’s observational routines may also have followed from
a number of observation-related occurrences. A common interruption regarded
an unusually good sighting of any given object. Say, for example, that Pluto or
Neptune were in a particularly good position for observation. If an astronomer
happened to “catch the planet,” he or she might announce it out loud, and that
would trigger a number of peer visits to his or her scope (Lake Countryside,
October 5, 2002).
Observing Celestial Objects

As a general rule, astronomers got to the field with some observational goals in
mind, even if sketchily defined. Given the nature of astronomical phenomena,
many of these goals were tied to the cyclical and/or opportunistic character of
such phenomena, the relative visibility of objects at certain times of the year
(month or day), and so on. Let us take Sally as an example. Sally was a biol-
ogist in her mid-30s, and she had been practicing amateur astronomy for about
a year. Although she first got involved with the practice by following her hus-
band’s (Steve) lead, by the time we met she had developed her own observational
goals and style. For instance, when she began her nightly observations at the
September 17, 2002 event at Mt Hillview, Sally searched for the M1033 star clus-
ter in Cassiopeia—a cluster that she had never seen before. As she explained,
observing M103 followed from her goal of looking at as many “pretty objects”
as possible, and she included star clusters as such. As we will see, the theme
of observing pretty objects appeared quite frequently in her narratives of the
hobby.
As we talked about several aspects of her hobby, Sally busily worked on her
telescope to find M103. She started by orienting herself relative to some key (for
her) celestial landmarks and proceeded to identify Cassiopeia with her naked eye.
She then described to me how she “star-hopped” across the target region of the
sky, in the process moving her scope across the visual field, from one recognizable
celestial object to the next. To do so, she consulted a number of celestial charts
that depicted the targeted region of Cassiopeia at different levels of resolution (see
Figure 2).
After some 10 min, Sally believed that she had found M103, and she stated,
“It’s quite open [as in many stars spread out, rather than bunched up], but it’s
pretty.” Still, she wanted to make sure that she had spotted the right formation,
and thus she began consulting several books in search of a picture of M103 that
could confirm or reject her inferences. After some reading and chart consultations,
Sally was content that she had correctly identified M103 and stated in a somewhat
disappointed voice, “It doesn’t excite me much. I’ve seen nicer things.”
Although in this case Sally worked on her own, she and others often collabo-
rated on short- and long-term projects or simply consulted with peers for explicit
help. For instance, people often knew the experienced members of the commu-
nity, and they might have requested their assistance when they stumbled upon any
difficulties. In addition, because individuals had scopes of different magnification,
practitioners often knew whose scope was capable of resolving object features
that others’ might not have. So participants often traded viewpoints on their
observations.
3 Celestial objects labeled Mx (x = 1, 2, 3 . . . 110) owe their name to Charles Messier, an 18th-
century French comet hunter who catalogued 110 objects that looked like comets but in reality were
something else (e.g., star clusters and novae). Observing Messier objects is widespread practice among
amateur astronomers, and some may complete the list several times throughout their careers. All
Messier objects are visible with binoculars or small scopes, and therefore they are a natural first step
in long-term projects for newcomers to the hobby.
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FIGURE 2 Sally consults a celestial chart in the dark of the night (Mt Hillview, September
7, 2002) (color figure available online).
Finally, after seeing any given object (and studying the scene, as Mitchell might
have put it), astronomers often took notes on these observations. As is widely
described in the specialized literature, taking observational notes helps one to
learn about various celestial objects and their defining features and eventually to
better see such objects (Levy, 1991). Note taking is also a requirement for receiv-
ing certificates/awards for certain achievements. For instance, one may submit an
annotated list of all Messier objects to the Astronomical League to receive the
League’s Messier certificate. Figure 3 shows a picture of Martha’s observational
notes, which she showed me when we met at the Lake Countryside event (October
5, 2002).
MITCHELL AND HIS ASTRONOMY PRACTICE
Mitchell was 36 years old when we met. He worked as a software engineer and
had practiced astronomy very sporadically starting in his teenage years. Beginning
in early 2001, however, his hobby practice picked up in dedication and sophisti-
cation, as documented in his notebooks. At the onset of this period of increased
hobby activity, Mitchell built his own Dobsonian telescope. Mitchell stated that
he was not the building type, but he claimed that he could not pass up the opportu-
nity of taking a telescope-making course with John Dobson himself—the creator
of what has become a very popular large-aperture telescope.
Mitchell’s 10-inch Dobsonian telescope formed the basis of the greater part of
his observations during the period of this study. However, he also had a smaller
FIGURE 3 Martha shows her observation notes (Lake Countryside, October 5, 2003). Notice
the summarizing quality of the entries and the list-like organization of the text (color figure
available online).
refractor-type scope that he described as an impulse buy. Being small, this tele-
scope was easy to set up and carry, and it was often Mitchell’s instrument of
choice for planetary, Moon, and, most recently, Sun observations. In addition, this
second scope helped him in his routine of comparing views of any given object
through a number of different instruments.
Being a software engineer, Mitchell was extremely savvy about technology
in general. At home he had three computers, each of which ran on a different
operating system. All computers ran several pieces of astronomy-related software,
from model-building to plotting software to instructional material, and more. He
also actively maintained a website on which he showcased some of his recent
projects, pictures, observational sketches, and personal materials (e.g., cooking
recipes).
Where and When Did He Practice Amateur Astronomy?

Mitchell’s astronomy activities took place across a number of sites. The first site
was his home, and Mitchell may have set up telescopes either in his backyard or,
more commonly, on the sidewalk. Home observing afforded Mitchell the chance
to practice astronomy on a regular basis and at “short bursts,” in contrast to the
long hours of observation typical of field outings.
The second site was Mt Hillview, where Mitchell actively participated in both
the public (i.e., star party) and private observation parts of events. Beginning on
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May 26, 2001, when he first visited the site, Mitchell had been actively attending
Mt Hillview events, and he almost never missed such an event.
The third site was Lake Countryside, which he visited several times a year,
but less frequently than the previous two sites, given its relative driving distance.
Mitchell’s visits to Lake Countryside picked up in 2002.

In addition to these sites, Mitchell occasionally observed from friends’ homes
or took his telescope on observing trips. Furthermore, as part of AAC-sponsored
activities, both Mitchell and Sally actively participated in the club’s monthly star
party held in the streets of large urban areas (known as City Star Parties). These
events were targeted exclusively at outreach and did not afford many chances for
practitioners to work on their own observational projects.
What Did He Observe?

Throughout the ethnographic period, Mitchell’s celestial observations could be
described as falling along a continuum of short- to long-term duration. At short
timescales, seasonal and one-time events were always a target of his practice.
For example, events such as eclipses, comets, and planet alignments are periodic
but relatively rare, and thus they always attracted Mitchell’s attention, as well as
others’. Likewise, one-time occurrences such as the birth of a nebula are also rare
and thus Mitchell and others often took the time to observe them.
At slightly extended timescales, Mitchell sometimes pursued “thematic”
projects that appeared in the literature. For example, at the Lake Countryside event
of October 15, 2002, Mitchell dedicated part of the night to observing a set of open
star clusters in the constellation of Cassiopeia. These projects were generally pur-
sued on an opportunistic basis, say, as he encountered them in his readings and in
conversations with peers.
In more extended activity, Mitchell pursued lists of observational targets
that are common currency in amateur astronomy circles and literature. For
instance, his observations of deep sky objects were often aimed at completing
well-known lists of observational targets (e.g., the Caldwell catalogue, which
contains a total of 109 objects), taking detailed notes of such observations, and
eventually submitting them to accredited organizations (e.g., the Astronomical
League) so as to get an award for the accomplishment (i.e., a certificate of
achievement).
It is interesting that whatever the targets of his observations, Mitchell often
revisited objects that he had previously observed. Lying behind these activities
was a deep aesthetic appreciation of the objects of his practice, as expressed in
notes such as “Saw Antares, in rising Scorpius, through binoculars. Very red, and
most breathtaking”; “After correcting focus, M13 resolved itself as a beautiful,
sharply defined cloud of stars”; and “I was amazed to note that [Jupiter’s] satellites
looked like small discs.”
Naturally, weather conditions may have an influence over what might be

observable in any single outing, as the following quote culled from Mitchell’s
books illustrates:
Unfortunately, the wind was picking up around this time, and the need to point
the scope high to get to M57 meant that the [telescope] tube was being blown
around by the wind. So we had to concentrate on objects lower in the sky. (June 23,
2001)
As we can see, Mitchell seemed to adapt gracefully to weather conditions—a

behavior that might be explained in part by the fact that he had broad knowledge
to recognize opportunities to observe “unscripted” objects.
Finally, other more impromptu observational activities result from contextual,
emergent observing activities. A dramatic illustration of this case is an optical
filter “competition” that Mitchell narrated in his notebook:
At this point, I wound up on a “shootout” of light pollution filters. The contest was
between my O-III filter, versus a friend’s Orion Ultrablack Filter. The target was the
Swan Nebula (M17, also known as the Omega Nebula) . . . The O-III outperformed
the Ultrablack Filter. Both were in very similar (10” F/7) scopes at similar magnifi-
cation (32 vs. 40 mm on my friend’s scope). The sky background was darker through
the O-III, and more of the nebula detail was visible. But both filters were better than
the normal, unfiltered view. (July 21, 2001)
THEORIZING INTEREST-BASED PRACTICE PARTICIPATION
Against this background on the functioning of amateur astronomy communities

and examples of how individual hobbyists instantiate their practices, I now con-
sider the specifics of the process of grounded theoretical development enacted in
my study and its resulting theory of interest-based, engaged participation in a prac-
tice. Although grounded theorists have developed tools for structuring grounded
theoretical endeavors (see, e.g., Charmaz, 2001), the process is intrinsically non-
linear in that the path to stable analytical categories (i.e., those that adequately
cover the entire data set) may take many tentative turns. Although my recounting
of the process is simplified, it nevertheless preserves the chronological refinement
of conceptual categories and, critically, the major analytical inferences leading
up to my results. Throughout, I take the liberty of opportunistically illustrating
analytical categories with excerpts from Mitchell’s astronomy notebooks. This is
technically a violation of the chronological presentation of data, as the notebooks
were only available at the very end of the study. But doing so allows me to show
rich and compelling data without devolving into a very long analytical narrative.
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FIGURE 4 Excerpt of a log of videotaped conversation with Mitchell (color figure available
online).
Note that because the research was designed around a focal case study (i.e.,
Mitchell), many of the coding categories that emerge from data analysis most
readily refer to Mitchell’s instantiation of the hobby. As I systematically compare
and contrast his practice to those of other astronomers, I broaden the descriptive
and explanatory range of these conceptual categories by capturing commonalties
and idiosyncrasies in practice participation that are the hallmark of interest-based
pursuits.
As a point of departure, consider my treatment of a piece of video log of
one of many interactions I had with Mitchell (see Figure 4). The log remarks
that Mitchell had gone on an observational trip, which in his case was always
done with groups of fellow astronomers. On the trip, he observed new celestial
objects, which he referred to as an observational project that he had borrowed
from the specialized periodical Sky & Telescope. As Mitchell told me, this project
was not immediately related to his ongoing, long-term goals, but it was contin-
uous with his stated goals of improving his conceptual and practical skills (see
below).
In the initial, open-coding phase of the process (Corbin & Strauss, 1990;
Harry et al., 2005), this stretch of video log was coded as (a) observational trip,
(b) observational project, and (c) Sky & Telescope.4 Ongoing analysis would or
would not preserve codes generated during the first phase of coding or would
more likely transform them in several ways. For example, when I discovered
that astronomers routinely consulted other periodicals (e.g., Astronomy and AAC’s
newsletter) for the same purposes (e.g., to search for observational projects), then
Sky & Telescope was subsumed under the category periodicals and eventually the
super-category literature (which also included the Web and astronomy books).
For ease of reference, Figure 5 shows a partial and simplified view of the
generation and refinement of conceptual categories in my analysis. The fig-
ure reads from left to right, and each column represents very roughly a phase
of data refinement/analysis, each of which may contain one or more data
4 In the remainder of the article, words in italics denote conceptual categories in the analytical
process.
FIGURE 5 A partial and simplified rendition of the refinement of conceptual categories over
analytical time.
collection sessions. Solid lines connecting categories across columns indicate

category transformations over analytical time, and dashed lines show actual and
hypothesized relationships among evolving categories.
As is commonly the case, initial coding of the data yielded a very large
number of categories (Harry et al., 2005), including telescopes, telescope type
(e.g., refractor), telescope mechanism (e.g., manual, automatic, or computer con-
trolled), AAC, Mt Hillview, star party, public, Lake Countryside (mentioned by
both Sally and Mitchell the very first time we talked), novae, color (as when
Mitchell described celestial objects as “mostly steady bluish white” in the case
of Vega and “bluish-white” in the case of Regulus), books, seeing (i.e., a word
482 AZEVEDO
used by amateur astronomers to mean the correct visual identification of a

celestial object), lectures, planets (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Venus), the Moon,
asteroids, deep sky objects, Messier objects, star clusters, variable stars, dou-
ble stars, galaxies, comets, globular clusters, periodical events (e.g., eclipses
and planet alignments), nebula, Cassiopeia, atlas and charts, goals (related to
the subject matter of astronomy, as when Mitchell wrote, “[I] need to work
harder on matching the view in atlas versus the binoculars, and tracking across
sky”), observational plans (i.e., targets for the night), note taking, City Star
Party (in that Mitchell, Sally, and many others systematically participated in
the outreach efforts of AAC, as we saw above), coffee breaks (related to the
dynamics of field practice), explaining (e.g., as when astronomers answered
questions from the public or spontaneously engaged the public in “lessons”),
eyepieces, filters, flashlights, values (e.g., as when Mitchell stated, “The more
conscientious you are, the more detail you see”), community norms and values
of practice (e.g., AAC’s dual focus on observational astronomy and outreach),
weather conditions, improvisation (as when changing weather conditions forced
one to rework observational plans for the night), repetitive performances (a
term I use to describe the common practice of repetitively observing a celestial
object for its aesthetic qualities or the like), skills (way finding and observa-
tional), sketching (many practitioners liked to draw the field of view of objects
they had observed and did so as a way to learn and achieve better seeing),
opportunistic observations (e.g., Pluto’s unusually good sighting), impromptu
observations, and troubleshooting (as when one needed to adjust the scope’s
mount midway through the night, or when dew began to accumulate on a scope’s
mirror).
Data from the interviews with Paula and Burton also entered into the initial
coding phase. In particular, two themes from those conversations reemerged dur-
ing the fieldwork period—binoculars and reading—and these further linked to
other themes in my ongoing observations. Indeed, Paula repeatedly referred to
reading astronomy as her (then) current form of astronomy practice at home
and away from active observational practice. In her description, reading Sky &
Telescope every month (she still held a subscription of the periodical) allowed
her to keep in touch with the hobby and the latest discoveries in the field, and
binoculars were a convenient way to occasionally peek at the Moon and nearby
celestial objects (say, Mars and Venus) from her backyard. Sally and Mitchell,
in contrast, used binoculars both for occasional observations from home (as did
Paula) but also as aids in way finding and checking their seeing of new objects.
As for reading magazines, Sally and Mitchell also showed a somewhat con-
trasting pattern of behavior to that of Paula in that they used literature as a
means of advancing a number of short- and long-term projects in addition to
a resource for pleasure reading. Analytically speaking, the point to observe is
that these commonalties and differences across practitioners’ hobbies captured
both tailored (i.e., idiosyncratic) and shared aspects of practice participation—that

is, hallmarks of interest-driven practice engagement—and therefore they sug-
gested the validity of the conceptual categories and themes emerging from my
analysis.
Along the same lines, during the period covering the first three visits to Mt
Hillview, I also began to group conceptual categories according to their common-
alties and relationships (see Figure 5, second column)—a second or axial phase of
coding, as termed by grounded theory (Harry et al., 2005). Pragmatically speak-
ing, conceptual categories were refined in multiple passes over the existing and
growing data pool. Thus, I grouped planets, Moon, Messier objects, asteroids, and
any of the many celestial objects Mitchell and others mentioned into the category
observational targets, which themselves were related to the categories observa-
tional projects and goals. The point was to follow not the individual observational
targets—there were just too many of them—but rather how they functioned (i.e.,
the purposes they served) in each astronomer’s practice.
Equipment—telescopes (most astronomers had more than one scope, and
Mitchell had two, as we saw previously, as well as a third and more powerful
one, acquired at the very end of the study period), varied eyepieces, and fil-
ters—constituted the basis of most hobbyists’ practices, though binoculars were
also used on many occasions. Telescopes had attributes such as type (refractor or
reflector), mechanism (manual, automatic, and computer controlled), and eventu-
ally site of use. AAC, Mt Hillview, Lake Countryside, desert (observational trip),
home, and City Star Party were joined into the larger category sites/communities
of practice, each with its own norms and values of practice (e.g., spreading the
hobby at City Star Parties and working on projects at Lake Countryside). Atlases
and charts were joined in the category representations, which were noted to come
in both print and electronic media (e.g., a personal digital assistant, in Mitchell’s
case). The conceptual category literature also appeared at this point.
Here too it was important to hone some categories by more clearly distin-
guishing between them. In particular, observational projects and goals were more
clearly differentiated in that projects were somewhat short term (on the order of a
few hours to a few months), whereas goals spanned larger timescales (e.g., devel-
oping expertise in particular observational targets or subareas or observing all
Messier objects). Goals would eventually be qualified into various types, such as
material, learning, and social ones (see Figure 5, third column).
Also, some categories previously listed (e.g., explanations, note taking, seeing,
and repetitive performances) were noted as underdeveloped and kept alive for
probing in subsequent data collection and analysis, and still others were dropped
or demoted in importance. In this latter group were categories such as flash-
lights, troubleshooting, public, lectures, and observational style (which proved
too abstract a category and not truly grounded in the data).
484 AZEVEDO
My visit to Lake Countryside (October 5, 2002) followed, and it too raised new
analytical categories for consideration, including Herschell and Caldwell lists of
observational targets, Astronomy and Mercury magazines, AAC Newsletter, and
City Star Party (as it was then clear that Mitchell, Sally, and others almost never
missed those events). In particular, it was at Lake Countryside that I was first
exposed to an actual example of observational notes (i.e., the artifacts of note
taking), as shown in Figure 3. Although most other astronomers took notes in one
form or another, I had not yet seen what such notes might have looked like. Later,
comparing these notes to Mitchell’s would make very salient the multiple and
specific dimensions of Mitchell’s extended hobby participation.
It is important to note that analysis of the Lake Countryside data helped to sta-
bilize and begin saturating some of the themes I had identified in the prior phases
(Charmaz, 2001). As it turned out, Mitchell, Sally, and many others dedicated
part of that night to an observational project also taken from Sky & Telescope.
The Sky & Telescope article had been written by Jackie, an experienced amateur
astronomer who was a regular at Mt Hillview and Lake Countryside and whom
Mitchell had befriended over the years. By the end of the night, Mitchell, Sally,
Steve (Sally’s husband), Jackie, Mauro (Jackie’s husband), and others had finished
the project, often peeking at one another’s scopes for better seeing. Collaboration
was thus an important dimension of Mitchell’s, Sally’s, and many others’ prac-
tices, an inference further strengthened by the ethnographic observations that
informal and more systematic collaborations were endemic (and therefore val-
ued) at both Mt Hillview and Lake Countryside events. But it was also clear that
the socializing function of collaboration was at least as important as its products,
and individuals clearly used the hobby as a means of developing friendships that
extended beyond the fields of practice. The common coffee breaks during observa-
tional practice, as well as many other moments of non-astronomy conversations,
were a further illustration of the importance of social moments for the mainte-
nance of sustained participation in the hobby. Socializing, then, began to show
how the hobby practice could not exist divorced from many other practices in a
person’s life—and therefore long-term participation in a practice of interest lay in
part outside the practice proper.
In a similar vein, the visit to Lake Countryside made very prominent the fact
that some forms of participation in amateur astronomy extended into domains
and disciplines beyond the hobby. For example, it was at Lake Countryside that
I met Noam and his astrophotography practice. Noam had a parallel practice in
photography, and he was quite good at it. When he started amateur astronomy,
marrying it with his interest in photography was a natural move for him. Likewise,
at the same event I also met an anonymous astronomer who was pursuing dark
sky photography, for which he sported some very advanced computer technol-
ogy. Very roughly, dark sky photography involves taking time-lapse pictures of
celestial objects unseen through other means. The pictures are taken through a
charge-coupled device camera attached to a telescope and connected to a com-

puter running advanced image-processing software that stitches many pictures
into a final composite image.
These radical and differing forms of tailoring the practice were glaring, and
together with my observations on the prominent socializing dimension of people’s

hobby they made clear the fact that interest-based participation in the practice
could not be attributed solely (or even mainly) to a person’s relationship to the
topic/domain purportedly at the core of the practice. In other words, a person did
not develop interest relationships with domains (cf. Krapp, 2003) or disciplinary
practices (cf. Greeno et al., 1998) but rather with a set of activities that intersected
with the substantive domain and practice of interest (amateur astronomy, in this
case) but also (and crucially) extended into and/or originated beyond other realms
of the person’s life. To capture this concept, I posited that these sets of activities—
that is, the fabric of activities of interest to any single person—result from (or
are spawned by) a number of deep-seated preferences that the person brings to
and/or develops in the practice. Preferences are long-term goals (observational,
material, aesthetic, practical, social, and others), values, beliefs, and so on that
together form a multidimensional motivational structure behind one’s extended,
self-motivated engagement in a practice. No single preference could explain a
hobbyist’s persistent pursuit of amateur astronomy; rather, persistence in the prac-
tice resulted from the complex and synergistic interaction among many such
preferences and their relative and contingent satisfaction over time and contexts.
To illustrate, I can say that, at a minimum, Noam’s long-term participation in
amateur astronomy stemmed from his preferences for socializing, photography,
as well as many substantive aspects of observational astronomy (e.g., various aes-
thetics) itself. In Mitchell’s case, however, pursuing amateur astronomy in the
long run resulted from his continued ability to engage his preferences for read-
ing astronomy (just like Paula, Sally, and many others did), to actively observe
celestial objects (unlike Paula, who practiced only reading astronomy, and the
anonymous astronomer, who practiced image-processing-based dark sky photog-
raphy but no observational astronomy), to engage in teaching astronomy (which
turned out to be the reason why he actively participated in City and Mt Hillview
Star Parties),5 and to socialize and develop friendships, among others that I was
still to uncover.
5 Teaching astronomy is a canonical case of analytical category that escaped my coding efforts in
the early phases of the process. The theme appeared, for instance, in the very first visit to Mt Hillview
when an old-timer named Chuck explicitly stated that he and his wife practiced astronomy because
they loved teaching. In fact, Chuck never brought a scope to the field but rather wandered around and
entertained large crowds with explanations aided by his laser pointer. Likewise, Mitchell’s constant
visits to City Star Parties and Mt Hillview Star Parties were a testament to his passion for teaching
astronomy, and he would later explicitly state in his notebooks his joy of explaining astronomy to the
public.
486 AZEVEDO
Upon visiting Mitchell for our first focused interview (February 2, 2003), I
sought (a) to saturate the now-central construct of preferences but also to further
develop the concept by (b) capturing patterns in how preferences are manifest
over time and (c) drawing relationships between the concept of preferences and
the many other conceptual categories that were left somewhat unelaborated up
to that point (see Figure 5, third column). The first point was made dramatically
apparent when Mitchell commented on the various technologies that he used as
part of his amateur astronomy practice. Stemming from his highly technical back-
ground and professional work in computer software development, Mitchell had
a couple of networked computers in his office, each of which ran different plan-
etarium software systems (i.e., applications software that performed everything
from generating simple star charts to generating ones that rendered semirealistic
views of the sky) and observation scheduling systems (e.g., to generate targets
for a night). In addition, he had a number of gadgets that he used in daily life
and that also figured in his astronomy field practice; his personal digital assis-
tant, for instance, ran a simplified version of one his home planetarium systems.
“Technifying” the practice was thus one of Mitchell’s preferences—one that origi-
nated outside and extended beyond amateur astronomy—and one that was critical
to his continued pursuit of the hobby. Note that others also made heavy use of
technologies in their amateur astronomy hobby, such as those who used computer-
controlled telescopes, and therefore they could also be said to have a preference
for technologies (though expressed in a different way), whereas others had no such
preference.
Another prominent preference emerging in Mitchell’s narrative regarded his
developing identity in amateur astronomy, which pervaded all aspects of his hobby
but most strongly his observational activities. As he synthesized it during the
interview, “I think I might be typical of people who are REALLY serious in
this hobby.” He then went on to describe a group of very experienced amateur
astronomers (some within his immediate AAC community, such as Jackie and
Mauro) and the details of their hobby practice. He remarked that, like him, “seri-
ous astronomers” invariably have good-quality telescopes and added, “They keep
notes, they do these awards, they . . . you know, they make sketches . . . ” These
activities, according to Mitchell, are often in the service of improving one’s obser-
vational skills, including seeing, way finding, and so on. This helped explain
the common presence of learning goals in Mitchell’s notes, as the following
illustrates:
For much of the night, I selected a Messier target and looked it up in the 90 mm
scope; John often followed suit and found the same object in the 8” SCT. Sometimes
objects looked very different in the two scopes. It was a good comparison between
the scopes and an instructive exercise in the effect aperture has on the view.
(October 20, 2001)
It was also in our first interview that I first saw Mitchell’s notes and realized
the high relevance of note taking to his hobby. It is telling that as he described
aspects of his note taking, Mitchell stated that much of it was an excuse to
write astronomy. As it turned out, he had a large collection of fountain pens
and ink, which he used to keep an extensive personal journal and engage in
many other writing tasks. Taking detailed observational notes was thus a natural
extension of Mitchell’s many other daily practices, and it too shaped and sus-
tained his astronomy practice. The multi-preference makeup of interest-driven
participation in a hobby thus continued to find corroborating and elaborative
evidence.
As for further detailing the relationships between preferences and other con-
ceptual categories, a few clues became immediately apparent that shed further
light on the structure of interest-driven participation. My prior inferences were
confirmed when I realized that Mitchell was indeed an eclectic observer when it
came to observational targets, projects, and goals: “In the world of astronomy I
don’t think that there’s any like . . . realm of observing that I think that I’ve really
given up or lost interest in” (Mitchell, October 23, 2003). Other astronomers,
however, were more selective in their use and focus of observational time. Sally,
for instance, tended to observe objects along what she defined as beauty, and as
she put it, “Many people specialize in a few objects” (Mt Hillview, September 7,
2002). Likewise, Martha confessed to some specific preferences:
2:27 Martha: I particularly like to look at double stars.

Flávio: And why?
Martha: Oh, I love them, they’re beautiful . . . they are like husband and
wife, there’s one . . . that’s faint and the other is bright. They’re
fascinating.
4:50 Martha: These are carbon stars and I love to look at carbon stars. They’re old,
they’re beautiful. (Lake Countryside, October 5, 2002)
Whether more or less varied in observational foci, then, a hobbyist’s interest-

based, tailored practice included multiple and parallel observational projects and
goals, which themselves were linked to multiple preferences. Thus, just as one’s
hobby practice as a whole had a multidimensional motivational structure (i.e.,
multiple and synergistic preferences), so too were preferences also multiple and
synergistic within the observational realm.
Just as critically, at this juncture it was patently clear that amateur astronomers
instantiated the practice differently across sites of practice. Sites/communities of
practice, of course, was a theme that had long emerged as cutting across prac-
titioners’ hobby, but the specific relationship between sites/communities and the
contextual expression of a person’s preferences had yet to be fleshed out. This
relationship turned out to be a very simple mechanism, and it was vastly illustrated
488 AZEVEDO
in the data—each such site provided specific constraints and affordances of

practice, and thus hobbyists could differentially engage their various prefer-
ences across sites. For instance, given the physical, geographical, and community
constraints and affordances of Mt Hillview and Lake Countryside, in general
practitioners at those sites sought to fulfill various observational and socializ-

ing preferences. Home practice, in contrast, afforded reading and observational
preferences. To refer to the set of constraints and affordances that included the
physical, geographical, and communal dimensions of sites/communities of prac-
tice, but also personal and institutional dimensions (e.g., one’s socioeconomic
status and access to sites of practice), I coined the more encompassing conceptual
category of conditions of practice.
Finally and centrally, preferences and conditions of practice clustered into what
I call lines of practice. A line of practice is a specific subset of a person’s pref-
erences (in and beyond the hobby practice) attuned to a subset of conditions of
practice in his or her life. Lines of practice can thus be seen in the specific pat-
terns of activities that spring from any single, enduring cluster of preferences and
conditions of practice. For example, Mitchell had a line of practice that I call book
astronomy and that was formed by two primary preferences—reading and his
identity as a serious astronomer—clustered and attuned primarily to the conditions
of practice of availability of funds, access to literature, and home (the site where
essentially all astronomers engage reading). To elaborate, we saw previously that
Mitchell had a preference for reading. This preference originated outside of and
predated his astronomy hobby (e.g., Mitchell routinely read all sorts of media
and subjects). In the context of amateur astronomy, Mitchell’s reading preference
then entered in contact with a number of other preferences in his repertoire, in
particular his identity as a serious astronomer, which explains his copious reading
of astronomy magazines, books, the Web, and others. Of course, conditions had
to be present so as to afford the clustering and expression of Mitchell’s reading
and identity preferences, as listed previously. In clustering in such a form, book
astronomy became a line of practice in his astronomy hobby and could be seen
in the unique pattern of activities that it generated—that is, reading at home from
a significant library of books, including exploring topics for sheer curiosity (e.g.,
astrophysics), more often in the winter (off) months.
Another line of practice in Mitchell’s hobby was teaching astronomy,
which was formed by the clumping of his preferences for teaching/explaining,
socializing, and reading, attuned primarily to conditions of practice such as
sites/communities (i.e., the AAC and its star parties) that value outreach activities
and the public that attended these events. As a line of practice, teaching astronomy
was embodied in a unique and significant pattern of activities in his short-and
long-term participation in the hobby. As Mitchell remarked during our interview,
“That’s a whole other dimension, which is the public side of it” (October 23,
2003). Indeed, it was a dimension that he enjoyed much, as he remarked in his
note books, “. . . the Moon was more interesting, with a very large crater wall on
the twilight side of the moon just catching the sunlight on the wall tops. That one
was fun to explain to the crowd” (June 30, 2001). In practice, the fun moments
of explaining he experienced at City and Mt Hillview Star Parties were enmeshed
with preferences for socializing with friends/public, as well for reading (which
appeared in his preparatory studying of the literature for details of objects that he
would show the public), and made teaching astronomy a line of practice in his
hobby.
Naturally, Mitchell and essentially all others at Mt Hillview and Lake
Countryside had observational lines of practice—that is, those manifested in their
field observational activities and those leading up to, and extending, these obser-
vations (e.g., planning targets for a night). This constituted the core of people’s
observational routines, and in Mitchell’s case it recruited most of his preferences,
including reading, writing, “technifying,” and socializing, among others. Most
strongly, Mitchell’s observational lines of practice were primarily defined by his
identity as a serious astronomer and its many entailments—including cultivating
a broad variety of observational targets, projects, and goals; occasionally get-
ting certificates; sketching; developing a broad aesthetics; and so on. All of these
preferences found expression primarily in attunement with conditions of practice
found in the many sites/communities of observational astronomy practice (home,
Mt Hillview, and Lake Countryside) and their many specific physical, geographic,
and communal characteristics.
As I visited Mitchell for a second and final interview (October 23, 2003), I
was also finally able to copy his notebooks. Faced with the extensive nature of
his notes, I decided to thoroughly code the first two notebooks—which amounted
to about 60% of his notes—and to selectively sample from the third notebook as
a way to further saturate stable conceptual categories, if needed. To thoroughly
code the books, I applied to the selected written corpus all categories I had devel-
oped up to that point—that is, those straddling all preceding coding phases. This
meant unpacking conceptual categories generated since the very first phase of
analysis (including dropped categories) and looking for them in the selected writ-
ten corpus. In all, this procedure served as a very strong test of my analytical
chain of inferences and helped saturate the concept of lines of practice. In par-
ticular, I could now better discern issues of dynamics in lines of practice by
better calibrating how people (Mitchell and others) used their time in the practice.
Figure 6 shows a general scheme of lines of practice and helps synthesize these
points.
In Figure 6, the larger arrow represents the set of conditions of practice bear-
ing on a person’s practice of interest. The smaller enclosed arrows represent
two hypothetical lines of practice in a person’s repertoire. Both lines of practice
and conditions of practice are shown as arrows because they change and evolve
over time. The arrows are also continuous because lines of practice represent
490 AZEVEDO
FIGURE 6 A schema of lines of practice and their dynamics.
deep continuities—along psychological, physical, material, cultural, communal,

and institutional dimensions—in the way in which one engages the practice of
interest.
Furthermore, lines 1 and 2 intersect because they share preferences and con-
ditions of practice. For example, Mitchell’s reading preference was instantiated
differently in both his book astronomy and observational astronomy lines of
practice. Similarly, his “technifying” preference played out differently in his
observational astronomy and teaching lines of practice. It follows that because
people learn (e.g., observational skills) along their lines of practice, intersections
between lines show knowledge and learning that cross line boundaries.
Still with regard to lines of practice 1 and 2, we see that at any point in
time a person pursues multiple and simultaneous lines of practice. Dynamically
speaking, this means that individuals switch focus among lines in the short and
long runs, perhaps enacting many lines simultaneously or privileging one line
over others. For example, on any single night (i.e., in the short term), Mitchell
and others engaged in multiple simultaneous observational projects and goals,
switching among them as conditions also changed. Similarly, at home Mitchell
may have constantly switched between book and observational astronomy. In
the longer term, Mitchell and others enacted lines of practice differentially,
backgrounding some lines and foregrounding others. In the winter months,
for instance, book astronomy was foregrounded and observational lines were
backgrounded.
In sum, lines of practice define long-term structures with short- and long-term
consequences for how one participates in a practice of interest. In this framing, a
person’s participation in such a practice cannot be understood without reference
to how the practice is continuously made relevant to his or her life. To sustain
interest-based, long-term engagement, the practice must make it possible for indi-
vidual hobbyists to differentially enact their broad variety of lines of practice
(preferences) across practice time, as we will see next. (For more on lines of
practice theory, please refer to Azevedo, 2005, 2011.)
EXPLAINING ENGAGED PARTICIPATION IN HOBBY PRACTICES
In light of the theory of lines of practice, I now extend my analysis to explain

individuals’ short- and long-term participation in a practice of interest. In doing
so, I aim to further rationalize the theoretical developments thus far and, important
to note, to prepare the ground for considering the pedagogical implications of my
theory.
From the perspective of lines of practice, explaining individuals’ extended,
interest-driven participation in a practice naturally follows from the structural
nature of the theory. Specifically, the theory suggests that one can produce an
account of how and what conditions of practice continuously enable hobbyists to
engage and develop their various preferences across practice time. Put differently,
how is it that amateur astronomy practices are organized so as to support the man-
ifest variety in participants’ lines of practice? What are the central structures and
processes in amateur astronomy practice that critically enable highly tailored (i.e.,
preference-based) short- and long-term forms of practice participation?
Methodologically speaking, my way into these questions was to revisit the prior
grounded theoretical process and to look for conditions of practice that recurred
across practice time and various hobbyists’ instantiations of amateur astronomy—
that is, to search for the enduring structures and processes that are empirically
observed to occur in (i.e., to shape and sustain) everyone’s instantiation of the
hobby (i.e., their lines of practice). Four key themes emerged from this analysis:
(a) the extensive and varied material infrastructure that is at the core of amateur
astronomers’ practices; (b) participation across several communities and/or sites
of astronomy practice, each of which privileges particular substantive foci in the
hobby; (c) activity structural resources that function as templates for short- and
long-term activities and that can be appropriated in highly tailored forms by dif-
ferent individuals; and (d) group processes that distribute the often complex work
of seeing a celestial object (or features thereof) and other forms of collaboration
and idea sharing.
Extensive and Varied Material Infrastructure

As we have seen, any single amateur astronomer simultaneously pursues several
lines of practice, each of which is an expression of clusters of his or her vari-
ous preferences attuned to certain conditions of practice. In turn, each such line of
practice is dependent upon a specific and potentially large material infrastructure.
By material infrastructure I mean to refer to the sum total of all material aspects of
the hobby, including the categories equipment (telescopes, etc.), literature, charts
and atlases, computer and computer software, and computer printouts of observa-
tional plans, among many others. For example, Mitchell’s reading line of practice
relied primarily on a wide variety of literature, in both print and electronic form,
492 AZEVEDO
but no telescopes. His observational lines of practice, however, required a dif-

ferent material infrastructure, including primarily various equipment (telescopes
of different types for different observing conditions and goals, binoculars, and
so on), literature, technology, and charts and atlases. Any line of practice in a
person’s repertoire is thus partly manifested in specific configurations of material

infrastructures.
When looking across practitioners, one can see that the material infrastruc-
ture of amateur astronomy is thus quite varied (i.e., heterogeneous) and extensive
(which can be confirmed with a visit to a specialized store). This should not be
surprising; given the idiosyncratic nature of interest-based pursuits, as manifested
in the variety of astronomers’ lines of practice, a varied and large material infras-
tructure has developed to fulfill the specific preferences of various individuals.
Telescopes are perhaps the best example of this case, given their ubiquitous nature.
A large variety of telescopes exist, each suited to particular budgets, observational
goals (e.g., planetary or deep sky observations), and contexts (quick-and-dirty
backyard observation or prolonged, detailed study of distant objects, craters on the
Moon, and so on). Indeed, at any AAC or Lake Countryside event, it was hard to
spot any two hobbyists with the same telescope, though models and brand names
were easy to identify.
Some astronomers such as Mitchell went so far as to build their own tele-
scopes from scratch, whereas others started with commercial, manually operated
or fully automatic ones (also known as GoTo telescopes), or perhaps a high-end
scope that interfaces with laptop computers. Almost as a rule, over the long haul
most astronomers acquired additional telescopes, each suited to supporting spe-
cific aspects of their developing observational goals. Mitchell, for instance, began
with binoculars, built his 10-inch Dobsonian (powerful enough for deep sky obser-
vations), then bought a low-end scope mostly for near sky observations (which he
carried out mostly from home and City Star Parties), and finally bought a much
larger scope at the end of the study. Sally, in contrast, seemed poised to pursue
a more canonical practice trajectory, as she had started with a low-end scope and
was about to acquire a more powerful one.
Even more dramatic is that because a person’s lines of practice in the hobby
often recruited preferences extending beyond astronomy proper, it made sense that
material infrastructures extraneous to the domain of astronomy would also come
to shape and sustain people’s amateur astronomy lines of practice. Again, con-
sider Mitchell’s case as an illustration. As we saw previously, Mitchell’s writing
astronomy line of practice was primarily founded on an extension of other writing
activities in his life, including a significant and much esteemed collection of foun-
tain pens and inks. Likewise, the technological infrastructure that he imported
into his many observational lines of practice was clearly continuous with other
practices beyond amateur astronomy and gave Mitchell’s hobby a flavor that was
distinctively his.
In sum, the point to observe is the central role of extensive and varied material
infrastructures as enabling sustained, highly tailored, interest-driven participation.
Practicing Simultaneously Across Several Sites and Communities

of Practice
Another dimension of practice common to the long-term hobby participation of
the many amateur astronomers I met in the fields was that they practiced astron-
omy across several sites/communities of practice. Each such site/community
provided specific conditions of practice (e.g., physical, geographical, institu-
tional, social, cultural, and so on) and thus afforded specific versions of the
hobby. Practicing at different sites/communities was therefore an expedient way
of tailoring one’s amateur astronomy practice. Indeed, just as specific material
infrastructures could be linked to specific lines of practice in a person’s hobby, so
too were lines of practice often bound to site/community.
For example, as we have seen, Lake Countryside’s geographical location was
ideal for quiet moments of deep sky observation, and the itinerant community that
gathered at the site was keen on observational goals centering on these targets.
At the same time, the site was also fertile ground for astronomers’ constant col-
laborations and socializing. In contrast, given the urban environment in which
the hobbyists lived, home observing was a space to work on projects centered
on nearby objects (e.g., planets and the Moon) and, in Mitchell’s case, to lure
passers-by for a lesson in astronomy (i.e., teaching) as well. For almost every
astronomer, home was also the preferred site for engaging in reading astronomy
(and, conversely, no one ever practiced reading astronomy at Mt Hillview or Lake
Countryside). City Star Parties, finally, were places for enacting primarily social
and teaching lines of practice. Again, the point is that the availability of distinct
sites and communities of practice, each of which espoused a certain instantia-
tion of the hobby—that is, a particular substantive focus of astronomy practice,
including observations of various kinds, teaching, reading, socializing, and so
on—afforded the practitioner the possibility of tailoring his or her practice in a
variety of ways.
Notice that in many practices in which people participate intensively and
extensively (e.g., work and school), at any given time individuals are likely to
be affiliated with a single such community of practice and/or institution. For
example, Lave and Wenger’s (1991) tailors were most probably members of
one and only one community of tailors. Similarly, Wenger’s (1998) insurance
claims employees worked for a single company (though within such a space they
belonged to several distinct communities of practice).
One might explain these observations by attending to the explicit, defin-
ing motives of a practice and the communities that enact it, and the way in
which these align with the goals of the participants. In the case of tailors,
494 AZEVEDO
presumably communities of tailors provide their members with the infrastructure

and long-term support they need to learn the trade, to contribute to their collective
efforts, and to become competent practitioners. In this sense, there is little reason
for a tailor apprentice to join more than one community of tailors. Furthermore,
and perhaps more important, given the demands of production in the commu-
nity and the resulting accountability structure, it is unlikely that a tailor could
effectively belong to more than one community of tailors. In this case, participat-
ing simultaneously in more than one community is simply impossible, or at least
counterproductive.
The picture is reversed in the case of the amateur astronomy clubs that I inves-
tigated. Hobby communities placed relatively little demands on their members,
so simultaneously belonging to and participating in more than one community
was the norm. In fact, hobby communities often formally and informally encour-
aged hobbyists to participate in other similar communities. AAC’s website, for
instance, had many links to other co-located clubs and astronomy resources.
Informally speaking, AAC members always exchanged ideas regarding their
future observational plans, most prominently at Lake Countryside and on other
outings. By selectively practicing across different sites and communities of ama-
teur astronomy practice, then, the individual developed organic links between the
hobby and many other preferences of his or her life and thus tailored the practice
across both place and time.
Structuring Short- and Long-Term Pursuits

Just as a large and varied material infrastructure was key to enabling hobbyists’
various lines of practice, some resources (conceptual, representational, thematic,
procedural, technological, and practice) were key to structuring the birth of and
sustaining lines of practice. As an example of one such structuring resource (Hall,
1996; Lave, 1988; Saxe, 1991), consider that all amateur astronomers I met in
the field mentioned that completing the Messier list was a past, present, or future
observational goal. To be sure, each such individual would do (or did) this in
distinct ways: Some observed the objects over a long period of time (say, because
they pursued multiple simultaneous observational goals, as was Mitchell’s case),
whereas others focused on finishing the list in the least possible amount of time.6
As we have seen, some took extensive notes on their observations, whereas others
took more synthetic ones, and still others simply tallied their observations (as
with Sally). Some aimed at getting a certificate for the feat (e.g., Mitchell), but
others would have never considered doing so, and so on. Whatever the case, the
6 As an extreme example consider the Messier Marathon, an attempt to observe all 110 Messier
objects in a single night. This is done in early spring on the northern hemisphere (Levy, 1991), when
all such objects are visible in the sky.
Messier list was the underlying observational goal, and the list was the artifact that
functioned as a resource structuring a long-term, coherent pursuit in the hobby that
could be (and was) flexibly appropriated by individual hobbyists.
As a further example of the structuring of extended, interest-based pursuits
in amateur astronomy, remember that two additional lists of observational targets

appeared widely at Mt Hillview and Lake Countryside: The Caldwell and Herschel
lists. The Caldwell Catalogue lists 109 galaxies, star clusters, and nebulae, and
it was compiled as a complement to the Messier list. Similarly, the Herschel
Catalogue lists 400 deep sky objects that are a subset of the original 5,000 objects
that appeared in John Herschel’s catalogue of 1864.7 The Caldwell and Herschel
lists are widely regarded as a natural next step for those who have observed
Messier objects, in terms of both difficulty/complexity and time duration. In this
regard, the three lists and their organization functioned as a curriculum of sorts.8
In the short term, observational projects of various types, lasting anywhere
from a single night to a few weeks (or months), constantly appear in various liter-
ature, as we have seen. Short-term projects may play several roles in structuring
preference-based participation. On the one hand, one may engage in a short-term
project simply for the sake of observing something new (say, a recent discovery).
At least initially, then, the activity appears as a filler activity—that is, one that is
short lived and not immediately connected to ongoing and future observational
goals but that provides some immediate aesthetic and/or emotional satisfaction.
In this sense, a short-term project functions as a template guiding activity that
affords the enactment of fleeting or emergent preferences.
On the other hand, short-term projects may feed into long-term goals, and this
provides a mechanism for engaging multiple preferences across time. For exam-
ple, toward the end of the ethnographic period, Mitchell lost his job. With his
mornings free, he acquired a solar filter and began observing and sketching Sun
spots—a project meant to last about 2 months, the product of which he intended
to submit for the Astronomical League’s Sun Spotter Award. The project was
undoubtedly motivated by Mitchell’s growing curiosity about the Sun and the
prospect of receiving the award. But according to Mitchell, the project’s main
“motor” was its affording (and indeed requiring) astronomical sketching—a pref-
erence he had recently developed and that he intended to hone and apply to his
larger practice. By explicitly fashioning connections between short- and long-
term activities, therefore, Mitchell selectively engaged preferences that were most
relevant to him over the long haul.
Finally, there are many ways in which short- and long-term projects are fur-
ther structured into coherent pursuits. As we have seen, observational note taking
7 Some objects in the Herschel Catalogue also appear in the Messier list.
8 The observation of these lists is valued much beyond the boundaries of Mt Hillview and Lake
Countryside, and indeed the lists are widely covered in the literature (e.g., Levy, 1991).
496 AZEVEDO
is exemplary of widespread, community/hobby-sanctioned practice and it serves

as a further organizing principle of observational practice. The elective pursuit
of certificates/awards provided for meaningful closure and recognition for some
(though not all), and these came with their own requirements that served struc-
turing functions. Impromptu activities, such as Mitchell’s “light pollution filter

shootout,” described earlier, offered a space in which ongoing observational goals
could be furthered (or folded into). For instance, unscripted observation of any sin-
gle Messier object through light pollution filters may have directly or indirectly
contributed to one’s advancement in terms of completing the list. The examples
are numerous and together they illustrate the layering of structuring resources
across time and sites of interest-driven practice.
In sum, there is a set of structural resources (conceptual, representational,
heuristic, thematic, practical, and so on) made available within and beyond astron-
omy communities that packages a series of practice and observational goals,
subgoals, and suggested courses of action for achieving these. These resources can
be appropriated in several ways—for example, they can be taken across sites and
communities, they can be pursued in solitary or collective practice or at a faster or
slower pace, and so on—and therefore they are central to persistent, interest-based
practice participation.
Supporting Preference-Based Participation in Collective Practice

When looking across amateur astronomers’ practices, one can see that the birth,
development, and sustaining of their various lines of practice is enmeshed with
and dependent upon several group processes. For instance, most people’s social
lines of practice were founded on the break moments that recurred throughout
the long nights of observation and the collaborative routines around observa-
tions (short and long term). More pointed is that observational lines of practice
were founded on various processes that shaped many aspects of lines of prac-
tice. The ongoing community help an astronomer receives in carrying out his or
her multiple observational goals and projects seems critical to sustaining work
along chosen, tailored trajectories. An example is the event at Lake Countryside
in which several astronomers collaboratively worked on a night-long project of
observing star clusters on and off under the explicit guidance of Jackie, who had
written the article/project published in Sky & Telescope. All collaborated through-
out the night, exchanging comments on their observations and trading views on
their differentially powered scopes.
Sharing of resources is key here. Jackie had the most powerful scope in the
group, and therefore it often served as the primary instrument for their observa-
tions, especially when it came to the most faint objects on the list. By comparing
views across many scopes, astronomers could develop a better sense for their
observations (i.e., a conceptual goal), in particular a more textured understanding
of the defining visual features of each target object (i.e., those features visible
across instruments). In other words, they could see the objects that were the tar-
get of their observational lines of practice. As mentioned previously, central here
was a process of distributing the work of seeing a celestial object. Just as quar-
termasters and apprentices steer a ship through a distribution of attributions and

tasks (Hutchins, 1998), then, persistent, interest-driven participation in amateur
astronomy is a distributed achievement.
In a related manner, members of the community often knew about one
another’s observational goals and projects. Thus, if they happened to spot some-
thing of importance to their peers, they might have invited these individuals to
look through their scope. In these instances, assistance often came through the
tight social connections that often grow in these communities, particularly Mt
Hillview, and the spontaneous and reciprocal favors that result from them. Idea
sharing, for both short- and long-term projects and goals, worked in a similar way
to enable the sustaining and extending of a person’s lines of practice.
The point to observe is that individuals constantly receive various kinds of
community assistance in pursuing their lines of practice, apparently wherever
these might take them. This is not to say that interest-based pursuits are founded
on a capricious diet of achievements that the practitioner sets for himself or her-
self. Indeed, in line with research on individual interests (e.g., Hidi & Renninger,
2006), I often found that hobbyists persisted in the face of hurdles. What is
noteworthy, however, is the extent to which conceptual and practical difficulties
central to the hobby of amateur astronomy were systematically mitigated by the
collaborative nature of its community practice. In a sense, difficulties were not
constituted as such.
LESSONS AND ISSUES FOR INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN
Different theories frame the phenomena under scrutiny in different ways and
therefore often lead to distinct explanations of such phenomena, predictions
regarding the future state of affairs, and practical entailments (e.g., regarding how
to design and effect change in the state of affairs). The theory of lines of practice
aims to revisit the nature of short- and long-term interests and engaged practice
participation and, when compared and contrasted with extant theorizing, produces
both distinct and overlapping explanations and predictions regarding students’
interest-based participation in science and mathematics activities as well as dis-
tinct and overlapping suggestions for the design of (formal and informal) learning
environments that aim to develop people’s interests in technical domains.
In this final section, I consider the pedagogical lessons that follow from lines of
practice theory. Lessons do not provide any detailed practical guideline or heuris-
tic for the design and implementation of interest-driven science and mathematics
498 AZEVEDO
learning environments; instead, lessons are simultaneously more general and

deeper, and therefore they inform instructional design efforts at more foundational
levels. As the reader will note, some lessons follow from the more general theory
of lines of practice, whereas others are taken directly from the use of the theory in
explaining interest-based participation in a practice.
Topic/Domain-Centered Activities
Just what the object of interest-based participation is—that is, what fuels
engagement—is a sticky point to nail. Following Weiner (1990), perhaps because
of the historical primacy of educational concerns, extant theorizing on the issue
has tended to essentialize interest relationships as domain or topic centered. This
is true for theorizing across the spectrum, from psychologically minded formula-
tions, for example, as in Hoffman (2002), in which students were said to develop
an interest relationship to the topic of physics, to situative accounts, in which
interest-based participation was seen to result from one’s engagement of many
identity facets (e.g., Greeno, 2006), but the epistemological aspect of identity
receives primacy in treatment (i.e., discipline-specific identity).
When translated into classroom practice, these theoretical approaches report
successes and failures, which attests to the difficulty of designing science and
mathematics learning environments that successfully develop students’ interests
(see, e.g., Eisenhart & Edwards, 2004; Hoffman, 2002). The point, however, is not
to assess the effectiveness of these approaches but rather to investigate their ability
to explain the interest-related phenomena they observe, particularly as these stem
from the purported core of interest-driven pursuits. For example, take Eisenhart
and Edwards’ (2004) excellent work with African American middle-school girls
in an after-school program aimed at introducing them to science and technology
skills and practices. Research shows that African American girls have tradition-
ally been shunned from technical domains and show little interest in pursuing
them, so Eisenhart and Edwards attempted to draw on the girls’ interests across
several realms of their lives (from youth culture and gender and ethnic identity to
community life) to pique their interest in science and technology.
Eisenhart and Edwards (2004) convincingly reported on the girls’ growing
interest-based engagement with some complex topics and computer-based tech-
nologies and their growing competence with these subjects. Furthermore, the
researchers showed that many of these cases were successful because the learn-
ing environment (broadly construed) allowed the girls to tailor activities to their
existing and emergent interests—which captures the nature of interest-driven pur-
suits, as lines of practice would also have it. And yet, Eisenhart and Edwards’
interpretation of students’ interest-based participation did not reflect the full com-
plexity of the phenomena they recorded. For instance, having determined that
fashion design was an interest shared by the girls, they developed an activity in
which the students were to use a software system to design and produce iron-
on prints and t-shirts (Eisenhart & Edwards, 2004, p. 162). The researchers were
happy to find out that the students did engage the activity, but they were somewhat
surprised that the girls did not do any design at all. Instead, the girls participated in
the activity for a reason different than the one anticipated—namely, to make shirts
that they could gift to relatives and friends—in effect transforming the activity
into something else.
From the perspective of lines of practice theory, however, the girls’ pattern
of participation is coherent, understandable, and indeed predictable. Specifically,
when interest-based pursuits are framed in terms of the simultaneous satisfaction
of a person’s various practice preferences across time, then the girls’ transforming
the activity indicates that they did not have a general interest in fashion/graphic
design. Instead, whatever preferences they might have had that intersected with
the domains of fashion and design, such preferences did not find expression
in the activity proposed by the researchers. However, the proposed activity did
provide conditions of practice conducive to the engagement of a different set of
preferences that neighbored fashion design and that the girls profitably engaged.
In sum, if students in Eisenhart and Edwards’ after-school technology- and
science-based program engaged with the activities they were given, it was not
because they developed an interest in the topics/domains purportedly at the core
of such activities but rather because the learning environment (broadly construed)
successfully afforded the expression of students’ multiple and multifaceted
preferences across time.
Pedagogically speaking, this suggests two broad lessons: (a) Designs for
interest-based science and mathematics learning (both formal and informal)
must be open to tailoring, which corroborates findings in the literature (e.g.,
Blumenfeld et al., 2006; Engle & Conant, 2002); and (b) the supported tailoring
must be radical enough to include very many different topics/domains, concerns,
values, and modes of expression that might extend much beyond the immediate
curricular targets.
Flailing Interests: Issues of Dynamics in Interest-Based Participation

Some dimensions of short- and long-term interests and engaged participation have
seen little treatment in research, so researchers know little about what to expect
when they see interest-based engagement. In particular, the dynamics of truly
interest-based participation, both as interests emerge as well as when they become
more or less established in a person’s practice, remain to be elaborated in detail.
For instance, many researchers have reported difficulties in sustaining students’
interest-based engagement, particularly in complex investigations in science and
mathematics disciplines (Blumenfeld et al., 2006). In general, there is some con-
sensus that interest-based participation fluctuates and changes focus across time
500 AZEVEDO
(Engle & Conant, 2002; Hidi & Renninger, 2006; Joseph & Edelson, 2002).
Both cases are seen as undesirable because they detract from students’ learn-
ing. As an example, take Edelson and Joseph’s (Collins, Joseph, & Bielaczyc,
2004; Edelson & Joseph, 2004) extensive work developing, implementing, ana-
lyzing, and refining an after-school program they named the Video Crew. Video
Crew was a year-long program in which students volunteered to participate in
activities focused on the topic of video production. Students met up to three
times a week for 1–3 hr a day in a learning environment that was structured as
a community in which students assumed multiple roles and responsibilities for
maintaining community values and life. Centrally, within the broad domain of
video production, the Video Crew was designed to accommodate students’ inter-
ests; accordingly, they were given free range to choose the content and means
of production of a large individual project. Students’ projects ranged in genre to
include animations, weather reports, documentaries and “mock-umentaries,” and
original fiction, among others, and were presented in a film festival attended by
parents and friends.
Edelson and Joseph described many encouraging results in fostering both stu-
dents’ long-term interests and their learning but showed concern with students’
flailing interests. In their observations, even highly engaged students did not show
sustained levels of participation across time, and the foci of their investigation
often shifted (Collins et al., 2004)—dynamics that they interpreted as problem-
atic. A lines of practice perspective suggests a different understanding, however.
Indeed, perhaps surprisingly, lines of practice theory posits that interest-centered
pursuits are by nature shifting in levels of energy and engagement and changing
in foci. In the rich, open, and time-extensive learning environments designed by
Joseph and Edelson, then, one would expect students to develop multiple and par-
allel lines of practice in the Video Crew space so that across time they would
shift focus among these lines and engage each more or less strongly and differen-
tially. Shifting foci and levels of engagement go together and reflect the changing
interactions between conditions of practice and preferences that are inherent to
interest-based practice participation.
In sum, interest-based participation is much more dynamic than we as
researchers seem to think, and we must calibrate our expectations if we are to
truly honor these dynamics in our instructional designs.
Boundaries and Ends of Interest-Driven Practice

Directly springing from conceptions of interests as topic/domain centered, activ-
ity designs for science and mathematics interest-based learning seek to spark and
sustain students’ interests within specific topics/domains that are the target of
curricula (say, the physics and mathematics of motion or the biology of insects).
As we have seen, usually students are allowed a good measure of choice so that
they have leeway to tailor given activities to their existing and emergent interests
(Blumenfeld et al., 2006). Still, even as we strive to foster students’ developing
interests, as educators we want them to cover the central ideas and concepts in
our learning activities. The topic/domain of learning is therefore still the driving
force around which students’ work and interests should develop and that students’
choice should serve.
As we have seen throughout this analysis, however, interest-driven pursuits do
not exactly function that way. Specifically, a lens of lines of practice suggests that,
given certain conditions of practice, people will weave all sorts of preferences into
ongoing and long-term activities of interest, thus sometimes deviating from the
intended curriculum and its topical core, often in dramatic ways. For example, let
us return to Joseph and Edelson’s (2002) Video Crew example. Given the focus
of that after-school program on developing students’ video production skills, the
researchers had hoped that students’ work and interests would center on the topic
of video throughout the year. Indeed, in one of the implementations of the pro-
gram, participating students indicated that they had some form of interest in the
topic of video prior to entering the program. But as the researchers observed after
the year-long program, although some students were passionate about video, some
were motivated by very different concerns and topics, which interfered with their
ability to carry out and finish projects. Perhaps worse, still others appeared to be
motivated solely by the social aspects of the given activities, such as cultivating
friendships or mediating the execution of group tasks, to the detriment of other
substantive components of the program.
Naturally, Edelson and Joseph saw this as a less-than-optimal situation. But
lines of practice theory suggests that interest-based participation in a practice
cannot be dissociated from its multitopical and social preferences—and, thus, stu-
dents pursuing an interest might end up extending the boundaries of the proposed
activities beyond the immediate substantive core of the activity, just as Edelson
and Joseph observed. Indeed, according to lines of practice theory, at times these
activities will be social in nature (i.e., they will have no content domain per se
but rather will refer to the daily business of living in community and sharing good
times that provide a critical glue to the fabric of activities that make up one’s inter-
ests). Instructional designs for interest-driven science and mathematics learning
must thus be sensitive to the boundary-extending character of interest-based pur-
suits and the necessarily social (broadly construed) nature of much of a person’s
interest-based practice participation.
Material Infrastructures
As highlighted in this analysis, the variety of lines of practice that people develop
in a practice of interest is predicated on a large and varied material infrastruc-
ture. In essence, people’s multiple and idiosyncratic preferences find expression
502 AZEVEDO
through various distinct aspects and configurations of materials (of all kinds) at the
core of the practice. In part, it is by combining these materials into increasingly
stable configurations (i.e., lines of practice) that individuals tailor the practice to
their developing interests.
Furthermore, people’s preferences often originate in and/or extend into other

realms of their lives. This means that existing material infrastructures must be
able to accommodate the expression of activities in multiple domains, values, and
concerns, in addition to whatever domain/discipline the target curriculum might
be concerned with.
Framing interest-driven participation as the creation and sustaining of lines
of practice, then, puts a strong focus on providing material infrastructures that
are adaptable (in that they can accommodate students’ emergent, developing, and
stable preferences in the practice), extendible (in that they support the expres-
sion of ideas beyond what is currently represented in the system), and flexible (in
that a broad variety of expressive needs and domains are supported). As we have
seen, similar observations have appeared in classroom-based research on students’
developing interests in science. For example, the technological infrastructures
described in the studies of Eisenhart and Edwards (2004) and Joseph and Edelson
(2002), reviewed previously, clearly fostered students’ preferences in their respec-
tive environments. Likewise, research on the Scratch programming environment
and community (Maloney, Resnick, Rusk, Silverman, & Eastmond, 2008; Resnick
et al., 2009) shows that youngsters’ ability to draw upon and extend existing
content is key to affording ongoing tailoring of activities and sustained participa-
tion. Finally, Azevedo (2006) showed that students’ self-initiated, interest-based,
more or less extended activities in computer-based, scientific image-processing
activities were made possible in large part because of an underlying computa-
tional infrastructure that afforded many forms of activity tailoring and extension,
from simple cutting and pasting to full-fledged programming. In all, the materi-
als used across these cases were quite different, and yet they somehow worked
to successfully sustain individuals’ engaged participation. Studying how they
did so can deeply inform decisions regarding how to design science and math-
ematics learning environments that approximate truly interest-driven forms of
participation.
Practicing Across Several Sites and Communities

A long-term interest in a practice develops and is maintained across
many sites/communities in which the practice is enacted. Each of these
sites/communities offers somewhat distinct conditions of practice and there-
fore affords the instantiation of specific versions of the practice of interest.
This suggests that a pedagogy for developing students’ extended, interest-based
participation in science and mathematics must be centrally concerned with
crating/sustaining multiple and cross-site/community connections among places

and institutions in which these disciplines are differentially enacted.
To be sure, systematic partnerships and more ephemeral links across
sites/communities have been implemented, especially those involving collabora-
tions between formal (i.e., schools) and informal (i.e., museums) sites of science
learning. Bevan et al. (2010) reported on several efforts of this kind, from short-
term field trips to more extended and substantive linkages. The central goal of
these efforts is to forge explicit connections between classroom activities and
science-rich institutions/programs so as to increase students’ encounters with ver-
sions of disciplinary practices and to allow them to tailor these encounters to their
budding interests. Schools, museums, neighborhood libraries, after-school pro-
grams, community centers, aquariums, and gardens are some of the sites in which
disciplinary practices may vary enough to allow some degree of personalization to
activities, especially through association and selective participation (Bevan et al.,
2010; Falk, 2009; National Research Council, 2009; Schauble, Beane, Coates,
Martin, & Sterling, 1996).
Practical efforts of these kinds have followed from theorizing that links (implic-
itly or explicitly) interest-based participation in science learning activities to
multiple places/communities of practice. In Krapp’s (2003) structural account
of individual interests, for example, the selective persistence of interest relation-
ships (i.e., the specific subset of activities one continuously engages with among
all available interest-related activities) is tied to various sites in which these activ-
ities carried out. In Barron’s (2006) work, reviewed previously, a central feature
of interest-based activities is that they are boundary/place crossing. Barron noted
that such boundary-crossing activities are indeed the motor for interest develop-
ment, as learning ecologies associated with specific sites afford specific learning
opportunities that further propel interest-based engagement. The theory of lines
of practice reaffirms the central role of multiple places (sites and communi-
ties of practice) for engaged, interest-driven participation in technical disciplines
and reiterates the need for continued efforts in researching how to best forge
connections among such places.
Structuring Resources
At short and long timescales, interest-based participation rests on resources
(ideational, representational, activity structural, and so on) that help structure
the person’s activities in the practice, as well as how the person goes about
engaging these activities across sites of practice. In schools, museums, after-
school programs, and aquariums much of this structuring function is performed
by the constraints and affordances built into several levels of each such insti-
tution. But in truly interest-driven practices, in which participation is radically
tailored, this structuring is provided through various resources that can be
504 AZEVEDO
flexibly appropriated into individuals’ various lines of practice (and life as a

whole).
This very same point was made in Barron’s (2006) research on youth’s devel-
oping interest-driven learning of technological subjects. As Barron noted, within
any single space in which individuals found themselves pursuing such interests,
resources of various kinds (e.g., books, computer programs, projects, and assign-
ments) acted to both spike and sustain their substantive engagement. Just how
exactly individuals put together these resources, in both the short and long runs,
to sustain their interests is yet to be worked out in detail. Likewise, the analysis
provided in lines of practice theory does not operate at a grain size that would
allow researchers and instructional designers to make any informed judgments on
the matter either, which leaves open many issues for future research.
Collective Supports for Participation in Preference-Aligned Ways

Contemporary analyses of human activity often highlight the distribution of work
and cognition as a central feature of complex sociotechnical systems (Hutchins,
1998; Law & Lynch, 1990). Thus, steering a ship requires the coordinated activity
of many specialized personnel, none of whom can perform the task in isolation
(Hutchins, 1998). Likewise, the successful piloting and landing of a jet airliner
depends upon the division of roles and attendant responsibilities among the pilots,
including the coordination of procedures and actions taken by each of them, in
succession or in tandem (Hutchins, 1995). Central to my concerns here is that the
work of technical disciplines is prototypically distributed, as is vastly documented
by the sociology of science (Pickering, 1995).
Following these observations, science educators have increasingly relied on
activity structures in which students work in small groups and on long-term,
complex, and open-ended projects (e.g., Engle & Conant, 2002; Pressick-Kilborn
& Walker, 2004). The goal is to provide students with opportunities to engage
the authentic practices of technical disciplines, particularly the many collective
aspects that organize knowing and learning in technoscientific pursuits.
Lines of practice theory adds to these perspectives by explicitly linking pro-
cesses of distribution of work and cognition to a mode of participation in practices
(i.e., interest-driven participation). More explicitly, whereas prior accounts prof-
itably articulated the distributed character of knowing and learning, the theory of
lines of practice adds the notion that distributing cognition and work is indeed
a motor for tailored, interest-driven participation. A few specific processes are
worthy of mention here. First, the constant assistance a practitioner receives from
the community encourages the pursuit of his or her emergent preferences, which
is key to sustaining participation in as-yet-unexplored directions. Second, the
collective practice of a hobby fosters short- and long-term interest-based pur-
suits by encouraging the sharing and borrowing of ideas, which the person can
then appropriate into activity forms more aligned with his or her preferences.
Finally, the short- and long-term pursuit of a practice of interest is predicated on

the concomitant engagement of several parallel preferences, and collective work
is a critical mediator of that process. As we as researchers seek to design sci-
ence and mathematics learning sites/communities in both formal and informal
environments, we must thus keep in mind how the distribution of work and cog-
nition simultaneously fosters learning/knowing and engaged, tailored forms of
participation.
CONCLUSION
This article has advanced twin practical and theoretical goals. In terms of theo-
rizing, I sought to revisit the very nature of interests and engaged participation in
science and mathematics activities by studying the hobby of amateur astronomy.
Hobbies have long been regarded by educators as exemplars of interest-driven
practice participation and models of self-guided, self-sustained learning (Barron,
2006; diSessa, 2001; Hidi & Renninger, 2006; Krapp, 2003; National Research
Council, 2009; Valsiner, 1992). By studying amateur astronomy and the tailored
practices that amateur astronomers fashion themselves, my aim was to escape
some common constraints that impinge on participants’ experiences across var-
ious kinds of practices (say, students in a science classroom or tailors in a
workshop) and that therefore might shape very specific forms of interests (e.g.,
exclusively discipline centered). A focus on hobbies, then, seeks to document a
more general and authentic version of interest-driven engagement, both short and
long term.
When compared and contrasted to extant theorizing, the theory that I have
advanced here—which I term lines of practice—paints a picture of interest-driven
practice participation that is distinct along some foundational dimensions. In par-
ticular, lines of practice stress how interests are realized in the specific fabric of
activities that a person fashions himself or herself and that by definition extends
into many realms of the person’s life. The practice of interest, therefore, has many
organic links to other practices in the person’s larger repertoire, and interest-
driven pursuits must be understood as resting both within and beyond the practice
of interest. It follows that an interest does not have a core whose essence is
topic/domain centered—as when one says, for instance, that a student has an
interest in biology, or science, or algebra, or technology, or programming, or
physics, and so on, or when one speaks of students developing specific mathemat-
ical or scientific identities. Rather, being interested in a practice requires weaving
it with many other concerns, domains, values, goals, and practices in one’s life
space, which makes the practice of interest meaningful in the short and long hauls.
Pragmatically speaking, then, to design (formal and informal) environments
for interest-driven science and mathematics learning, instructional designers must
proceed from a somewhat different basis and set of assumptions than currently
506 AZEVEDO
held, which I briefly outlined in a set of pedagogical lessons. In the long haul, my
hope is that work on lines of practice will (a) spark sustained research on varied
manifestations of interest-driven participation in science and mathematics activi-
ties within and across different communities and sites in which these disciplines
are enacted (e.g., schools, museums, zoos, after-school programs, the home and
the streets, among others), (b) contribute to a refined understanding of motiva-
tional phenomena in learning technical disciplines, and (c) help improve science
and mathematics educational practice as a whole.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work grew out of many conversations with Andy diSessa, Rogers Hall, Geoff
Saxe, and members of the Berkeley Boxer Research Group, including Rafael
Granados, Nicole Gillespie, Eric Eslinger, Orit Parnafes, and Jeff Friedman. I
sincerely thank the subjects who donated their time to this research, especially
Mitchell and Sally. I also thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their
thoughtful suggestions on an earlier version of the manuscript. This work was sup-
ported in part by a dissertation year fellowship from the Spencer Foundation, to
which I am greatly indebted. The views advanced here are those of the author and
do not reflect those of the Foundation.
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This article was downloaded by: [Computing & Library Services, University

Journal of the Learning

The Tailored Practice of

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2012.730082

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

LEARNING OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL STRAND

The Tailored Practice of Hobbies and Its

This article seeks to sharpen current conceptualizations of interests and engaged

Correspondence should be addressed to Flávio S. Azevedo, Teacher Education and Curriculum

As used here, interest-based engagement in a practice refers to self-motivated,

nature of engaged participation. In what may be called a common learning

Pressick-Kilborn and Walker (2004) documented how a fifth-grade science

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE ARTICLE

Addressing my research goals entails explaining the varieties of individual hobby

RESEARCH CONTEXT AND METHODS

Starting tentatively in 2000 and intensifying in 2002 and 2003, I documented

project eventually severed our communication.

My research design called for an in-depth case study of extended, individual

many different sites, sites of practice themselves became a case, to be developed in

observational and personal character, all of which he graciously allowed me to

therefore provided evidence central to triangulating and/or confirming analytical

THE COLLECTIVE PRACTICE OF AMATEUR ASTRONOMY

I followed amateur astronomers’ collective practice at two physical sites, both

A Typical Night in the Field

an outreach effort that is replicated by several amateur astronomy associations

Observing Celestial Objects

MITCHELL AND HIS ASTRONOMY PRACTICE

Where and When Did He Practice Amateur Astronomy?

Mitchell’s visits to Lake Countryside picked up in 2002.

What Did He Observe?

Naturally, weather conditions may have an influence over what might be

As we can see, Mitchell seemed to adapt gracefully to weather conditions—a

THEORIZING INTEREST-BASED PRACTICE PARTICIPATION

Against this background on the functioning of amateur astronomy communities

collection sessions. Solid lines connecting categories across columns indicate

used by amateur astronomers to mean the correct visual identification of a

both tailored (i.e., idiosyncratic) and shared aspects of practice participation—that

charge-coupled device camera attached to a telescope and connected to a com-

together with my observations on the prominent socializing dimension of people’s

2:27 Martha: I particularly like to look at double stars.

Whether more or less varied in observational foci, then, a hobbyist’s interest-

in the data—each such site provided specific constraints and affordances of

practitioners at those sites sought to fulfill various observational and socializ-

FIGURE 6 A schema of lines of practice and their dynamics.

deep continuities—along psychological, physical, material, cultural, communal,

EXPLAINING ENGAGED PARTICIPATION IN HOBBY PRACTICES

In light of the theory of lines of practice, I now extend my analysis to explain

Extensive and Varied Material Infrastructure

but no telescopes. His observational lines of practice, however, required a dif-

person’s repertoire is thus partly manifested in specific configurations of material

Practicing Simultaneously Across Several Sites and Communities

presumably communities of tailors provide their members with the infrastructure

Structuring Short- and Long-Term Pursuits

in amateur astronomy, remember that two additional lists of observational targets

is exemplary of widespread, community/hobby-sanctioned practice and it serves

turing functions. Impromptu activities, such as Mitchell’s “light pollution filter

Supporting Preference-Based Participation in Collective Practice

termasters and apprentices steer a ship through a distribution of attributions and

LESSONS AND ISSUES FOR INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN

learning environments; instead, lessons are simultaneously more general and

explaining interest-based participation in a practice.

Flailing Interests: Issues of Dynamics in Interest-Based Participation

Boundaries and Ends of Interest-Driven Practice

Furthermore, people’s preferences often originate in and/or extend into other