Artifacts are sensory, material objects that can travel through time and space. As they travel, artifacts hold memories and tell stories. They are texts in contexts, and as such, they can be used as a point of entry into different forms of writing, text making, and narrative. Kate Pahl and Jennifer Rowsell’s Artifactual Literacies: Every Object Tells a Story proposes a new approach to literacy learning and teaching predicated on the “artifactual.” They argue that artifacts can bring together two domains of situated literacy practice — home and school — in ways that help young people mediate difficult physical, cultural, and linguistic crossings. If school-based literacy is a site of struggle for students whose home languages and literacies are underrepresented in the classroom, then everyday objects, or artifacts, can be used by students as leverage to open new spaces for themselves in writing and in other forms of public discourse and identity performance.
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric