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Serious play: A comparative study of engagement and learning in hobby practices

Flavio Azevedo, University of California Santa Cruz (Click name for speaker's biography)
Monday, February 13, 2006
BSB 2019

Abstract: Educators seeking to motivate students often do so by inquiring into students’ interests and designing instruction anchored in such interests. This approach is based on psychological theories of individual (long-term) interests, which propose that a person’s extended, self-motivated pursuit of topically related activities flow directly and simply from her relationship to the topic or domain. As an example, a child’s continued engagement with a set of dinosaur-related activities is said to stem from her interest in the topic of dinosaurs.

In this talk, I begin by considering some of the shortcomings of purely psychological models of individual interests. As an alternative to these models, I then present a practice-centered theory of interest relationships. At the core, the theory seeks to articulate relationships amongst the multiple factors (e.g., the person’s full mental ecology, the constraints and affordances of sites of practice, the norms and values of the communities of which she is a part, the larger socio-cultural milieu, and so on) involved in shaping and sustaining a person’s interest relationships. Put differently, the central question for the theory is: How is a practice of interest continually made relevant to a person’s life?

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