Students Interaction with Educational Everyday Artifacts as an Anthropological Practice

DOI: 10.33876/2311-0546/2025-2/44-66

Abstract

Based on a study conducted in 2023/24, the article examines students’ interactions with artifacts of everyday educational life from the perspective of anthropological practices. In the era of digital content and virtual communication, it is most interesting to monitor the processes of interaction between teachers, students, and parents with objects and things of school life. Children's interest in artifacts is not accidental. At school, in a museum, in a home collection, they encounter artifacts of the historical, heroic or everyday past that “speak” to them in the language of an era. The school is a concentration of student artifacts from diplomas and cups, awards and medals to an old ruler, a wall newspaper from the 1980s or an inscription on the wall in the schoolyard. The everyday educational artifact is a material or abstract entity either created earlier and of historical value or created by the participants of an educational process at a moment of activity or event in the educational environment, capable of giving a certain experience, emotion, the impression that makes tradition come alive. Artifacts are always defined by the participants of educational relations as important, valuable, interesting, emotional, socially significant. In the course of our work, we studied the anthropological practices of interaction between students, administrators, and teachers with artifacts of everyday educational life in schools occupying both old, historical buildings with museum spaces and legends, and new ones without notable history. In the course of our work, we have identified different ways of interaction with artifacts of everyday educational life: through interaction with historical architecture and interiors, objects of museum collections, artifacts of educational everyday life in the classroom, the creation of pseudo-artifacts and symbols to maintain their own importance in the educational environment. It was found that high school students are better at building anthropological boundaries when interacting with artifacts than elementary school and 5th-6th grade students. Deeper social experience, the development of self-presentation and self-determination help them shape their history through the things and objects of school life, enriching the boundaries of anthropological experience with their values, intentions, interests and expectations.