Advantages
Build skills in both written and oral communication and therefore equips students with transferrable skills that enhance employability. Encourages lateral and creative thinking in using seemingly inapplicable objects as springboards for higher level thinking. Easily transfers to disciplines interested in material culture, but also a highly useful exercise for encouraging reflexivity in professions otherwise disengaged with material culture.
Challenges
Students often select sentimental items as points of inspiration. This can sometimes delimit the writing process, where students approach the exercise with preconceived ideas about the object's meaning. Encouraging students to randomly select an item can inspire creative more thinking.
Tips for implementation
Encourage students to think beyond the personal meaning they may have attached to their chosen artifact, as a means of better using the item as a point of inspiration for a new exercise.
How it supports academic integrity
Offering students an opportunity to select their own artifact encourages a sense of ownership over the task, which is a potential deterrent to academic misconduct. Pairing written and spoken components also serves to verify students' engagement, and will alert the convenor (or tutor) in the case of marked discrepancies between written and spoken delivery.