Artifacts As A Research Tool

I use the term artifact to mean an object produced or shaped by human craft. The artifacts I used as a tool in my research are simple, malleable sculptures, formed from recycled zippers and telephone wire mounted on bases of wood or foam, that depict human shapes in relationship within educative settings. I used the artifacts as a strategy in my fieldwork, as a tactile and visual thinking tool, and as an alternative means of communication. At the Centre during the Monday meetings, I presented sculptures I had created before and during the study. The sculptures were used during the Group Talks with student interviewees. I created a banner with letters formed from zippers and a sculpture of a Reader & Writer as gifts to the Reading and Writing Centre. As well, some students, tutors and a teacher chose to create their own sculptures during an activity and discussion I facilitated about experiences as an adult student.

Rationale for using Artifacts

The tools one chooses as an ethnographer will help shape the ethnographic description, whether the tools are pen, computer, camera, or artifact. These tools are an extension of one's physical being and a reflection of who one is. I have always needed to create and use artifacts to maintain some balance in my life. Art is a thinking tool for me, a means of reflexivity - a way to help move back and forth from the concrete to the abstract. I am a visual thinker and am drawn to communicate in other means besides words and written text. I have always been attracted to the unexpected and the open-endedness of art and visual imagination, and to the creation of artifacts. I believe this process is also integral to the general research process, where the researcher works to make the familiar strange and the strange, familiar:

To tap into imagination is to become able to break with what is supposedly fixed and finished, objectively and independently real. It is to see beyond what the imaginer has called normal or "common-sensible" and to carve out new orders in experience. Doing so, a person may become freed to glimpse what might be, to form notions of what should be and what is not yet. And the same person may, at the same time, remain in touch with what presumably is (Maxine Greene, 1985:19).