Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/the-racetrack-translating-ideas-into-reality-through-artifact/5026453/
*Photos can be found in the pdf version of this article.
Artifacts. They are powerful tools that, understood correctly, carry rich stories about the people who create them and the places where they are created. Often we imagine artifacts as the province of disciplines such as anthropology or, in earlier years, classes such as history or social studies. However, artifacts are all around us in the world of the young child, and the stories they tell about their creators and contexts are no less interesting when those are children and a classroom, respectively. A variety of research suggests a few things about children’s artifacts.
Artifacts are windows into children’s experiences (e.g. Blaisedell, Arnott, & Wall, 2019; Ghiso, 2015), and can inform us about children’s skills across a variety of domains (e.g. Chen & McNamee, 2007; Geist, 2016). Artifacts can reveal children’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions about locales and spaces (e.g. Clark, 2011; McCann, 2014). Artifacts are a child’s participation in the cultural heritage of humanity, and evidence that children have stories to tell. Taken together, then, it seems as if these are not undergirded by a singular idea. Namely, that an artifact is both a result of and a tool for ...