“Make Your Own Votive”: From Ancient Healing to Modern Well-Being, a Case Study in Object-Based Learning

Abstract Handling and making objects can make an important contribution to learning, bringing sensory dimensions to understanding technology, style, and functions of objects; thus I use object-based learning as building blocks in my teaching of university students. In the context of the recent pandemic, I had dual concerns about the absence of physical engagement with objects and their materiality (during the long period classes pivoted online) and about the individual and collective well-being of our students, so I designed a new activity to address this in the context of an archaeology module on Minoan Crete. I asked each student to make their own votive offering, photograph/catalogue it, and place it in an experiential/experimental space by writing a prayer or other piece of creative writing about it. In this paper, I describe and reflect on the activity, using three years of collected data, together with student reflections made at the time of making the votive, plus additional interviews conducted later.