Artifacts, Tools, and Classrooms

Although schools contain many material artifacts, studies in classrooms have tended to focus on discourse and quality of social interaction even when artifacts are being used. Responding to Engstrom's (1999) invitation to take artifacts seriously, three studies are described in which a material object was essential to a classroom activity. The first artifact was an enlarged text which had been transferred to a flip chart for the purpose of shared reading. The second was a jigsaw used in a mathematics session. The third was a textbook used by Vietnamese university students who were learning English. The three material objects central to the events are explored from the viewpoint of human functioning and in relation to Wartofsky's (1979) three categories of artifact.