Tactile Storying - Session 1

Metadata: 14 Jan 2026, A special education school in Flanders.

Tactile Storying was conducted with three blind and low-vision children at a special education school in Flanders, seated in a circle alongside their teacher, who transcribed verbal contributions, and the researcher, who documented tactile engagement throughout. The object passed between them was a researcher-constructed assemblage in two distinct parts held together by jute string: a standalone anthropomorphic wooden carving evoking the bony lower half of a human figure, and a separate textile body to which it was tethered. The textile body was itself a composite: multiple fabrics of varying weight and surface quality, sections of plastic, and metal rings worked together into a single form, with a piece of velvet (blue on one face, bordeaux on the other) among the materials attached to it. A section of stitched fabric within the textile body carried a layered, irregular surface that recalled the topography of a map, and a pouch-like structure formed a distinct spatial enclosure within the whole. The wooden and textile parts read as coherent but separate presences, joined rather than merged. Nothing was named. The object's meanings were left to arrive through touch.

An initial exploration phase of approximately four minutes preceded the first contribution. When the first child spoke, the object had already begun to do its work: the angular geometry of the wooden carving, felt as a distinct body tethered to but apart from the textile mass, produced a scarecrow. This was not a simple analogy (these children were reading through their hands) but a material inference drawn from the form's skeletal definition, its separateness, the way it hung or stood relative to the textile body it was joined to by string. The blue face of the velvet, encountered on that textile body as its own zone, brought the bird. The tethered structure of the object may have quietly underwritten this division: a figure, and the world it inhabited, already held in relation by the string between them. Within the first several turns the story had its world and its central figure, both generated by the object's own tactile logic rather than imposed from outside.

What followed across approximately seventy turns and seventy minutes was a demonstration of how material features scaffold participatory sense-making when they are held in common (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007; Gallagher, 2017). Children encoded specific zones with narrative roles early in the session and returned to those encodings without re-exploring them as the story required. The pouch became a spatial enclosure: a nest in one turn, a household threshold in another, the gesture of a hand moving into it carrying directional meaning that the story absorbed and extended. The map-like textile entered the narrative late, as the bird's world grew large enough to need geography. The object was functioning as a distributed memory (Hutchins, 1995; Wegner, 1987): its accumulated haptic history held the story's shape across speakers, enabling children to retrieve and extend narrative branches anchored in material zones that had been touched but left undeveloped many turns earlier. The artefact did not merely prompt the story; it preserved it.

The two-part structure of the object continued to carry meaning across the session in ways that exceeded the initial scarecrow-bird encoding. The jute string connecting the wooden and textile bodies (itself a material presence, tactilely distinct from both) introduced a third relational zone: something that joined, that could be felt taut or slack, that implied distance as well as connection. Whether children consciously encoded this zone narratively or whether it operated below explicit articulation, the structural logic of the object (two bodies held together) gave the story a relational architecture that a unified object would not have provided. When individual contributions threatened the coherence of the collective arc, repair came not through verbal correction but through the object itself: a subsequent child, handling a zone already encoded with shared meaning, would quietly reorient the story back toward its agreed shape, enacting co-regulation through material re-anchoring rather than social pressure (Sawyer, 2003). The haptic handover structured each transition, each transfer of the object marking a change of speaker and a continuation of the tactile history the object carried forward (Iwasaki et al., 2022; Paterson, 2007). Every child contributed at every turn. Participation was made materially present rather than socially compelled.