The items in my purse included the following:

The list above is what can be found in my purse this week. I have some items that I would identify as essentials that I regularly ensure are in my purse before leaving the house, and the remainder would be in the bag as integral at the point in time the picture was taken. So those non-essential items I labelled, quintessentially would be important for that weekend or moment in time, but not continuously a priority item taking real estate in my purse. 

The stickers on my laptop are from the ed-tech conferences I have attended. The logos and sayings are from companies advertising their product or the goals of their product. Text is often combined with images to be representative and recognizable. The more well-known your company is, the more comfortable a customer is to try a product or service. The stickers were designed online and printed and cut using a Cricut or something similar. Similarly, the T-shirt and lanyard that I have in my bag have the tournament logo labelled, so it is clear what event we are volunteers for. The text on the shirt, that has the tournament information, year etc., remains, and when worn in future years, will remind me of the event as well as possibly cause interest or discussion by others. The lanyard I have is given to volunteers, athletes, coaches, scouts and other organization members, with different titles labelled in bold at the bottom. Those with these printed passes have front-of-the-line access and can bypass lines, or gain entry into restricted areas. Typed text can be transferred to clothes and cardboard using technology. The field trip folder has a list of student names and is so important when travelling anywhere, to call students by name before leaving, monitoring during and returning from field trips. The list is ordered alphabetically by the last name, which is often the case with lists of student names. It is so interesting how we order text alphabetically. Our programs like Excel for instance easily can order alphabetically A-Z or Z-A. My wallet has a list of identity-related items, mostly with my name on it. My health card is a pass to all of my health records stored in a digital data system. My debit card and credit card connect me, to my electronic banking system. My laptop is primarily used to search type, read, plan and create. My laptop is in my purse and not my iPad pro, because it is easier to type text on my Chromebook, thus making it my choice of the mobile device to complete work tasks.

My laptop travels with me from home to school, and always if I am travelling. My career as a teacher relies on an exceptional amount of planning, prepping and communicating outside the school day. In addition to my career, I also am highly engaged and participatory in all my Masters’ Courses and need access to my laptop to ensure I stay on top of my readings, assignments and participation in my courses. Carrying a laptop regularly would signal to someone examining the contents of my bag the intense workload of my career. I am not able to leave my work at work, as I have to bring it home in my time ‘off’, to ensure that I am performing well in my career.

Alexander Macdonald (TEDxTalks, 2016) described how the movement of tap dancing is reinvented and reused, through oral tradition. Similarly, I rely on my experiences of watching my parents volunteer, and how they interacted in different events, impacting my cultural literacy. I too have been influenced by oral tradition in how I will interact through speech, and gestures that accompany speech with those that I volunteer with. In terms of signing up for a volunteer position, it required digital literacy, as did my job at the door which involved scanning QR codes from tickets to allow entry.

If I were to take a look at my bag 10 years ago, this would mark the start of my teaching career. I did not need glasses then, and we were not given laptops that we could use, but I would have had my personal Macbook in there for sure. I would not have a case or stickers on my laptop from the conferences I visited. I also would only have my health card to worry about not my children’s as well. My car and home keys would look different.

Something I thought about is that my dad used to carry pictures of us in his wallet, and now we carry pictures of our loved ones too, but on our phones. I thought that was a unique attribute of our current temporal period. This exercise made me reflect on my habits of maintaining order in the bag I carry to and from work. Archaeologist opinion would observe that I am continually ensuring I have what I need, and removing items that are not of use. Evidently, order and personal organization are important to me. I would have to say that this is also a skill and personality trait of mine, being organized and thorough, so I think my bag would reflect it. I also am regularly contributing to my school or local community through volunteering, and having a volunteer shirt in my bag is not surprising, as I regularly participate or contribute to events. 

References

TEDxTalks. (2016, February 26). Oral tradition in the age of smartphones | Alexander Macdonald | Tedxfulbrightdublin  [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egO_46P894k