A pedagogy for interest development: The case of amateur astronomy practice

This special issue of Learning, Culture and Social Interaction (LCSI) calls for conceptualizing interests as a learning phenomenon so that accounts of thought processes can be more faithful to the “fulness of [one's] life” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 10). I address such a call by investigating the pedagogy of the hobby of amateur astronomy. Hobbies are widely regarded as prototypically interest-driven practices, and thus probing how they structure opportunities for participation and learning can provide deep insights into the nature of interests and their relationship to learning. By choosing the lens of pedagogy, furthermore, I pursue two additional goals. Opportunistically, I seek to fill the dearth of studies on pedagogies for interest development and to illustrate an empirical approach to doing so. Strategically, the focus on pedagogy necessitates a close attention to teaching and learning phenomena and therefore may more readily be appropriated by practitioners.