ABSTRACT
The objective of this chapter is to address how visual and art-based techniques, in particular “identity artefacts”, can create avenues for research participants to communicate and reflect on their lives and identities in multimodal ways in situ and over time. This chapter highlights how these rich and complex data, and those created by the use of such methods, are likely to have important implications for educational research, practice and theory building. In particular, it is illustrated how using visual and art-based techniques within the multi-method autobiographical approach has informed the funds of identity theory, in the broader framework of the funds of knowledge approach. While initially this theory was suggested as a strategy of educational contextualization, linking contents of science, literacy and mathematics with identities and experiences of students, the incorporation of identity artefacts has modified the theory in two fundamental senses. First, to reconsider the productive, rather than reproductive, nature of funds of identity (which are created rather than identified). Second, to consider students’ identities as a curricular object and an objective in itself.
