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.

Metadata: Scans of notebook pages showing turn taking, narrative building sequence on the left, and PSM notes for each turn taking on the right.

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.

Tactile Storying - Session 2

Metadata: 28 Jan 2026, A special education school in Flanders.

A second implementation of the Tactile Storying protocol was conducted with a different group of three blind and low-vision children at the same school in Flanders, under the same conditions: circular seating, teacher transcription, researcher documentation, and an initial exploration phase of approximately four minutes before the first turn began. The object in this session was distinct in both construction and intention. Its body was pillow-like but uneven, its surface assembled from patches of fabric in contrasting textures and weights, with a cavity running through its core. Through this cavity passed a wooden arm wrapped in fabric, articulated at its far end to an abstract wooden form (loosely suggestive of a small landscape) around which string was wound. The mechanism was quiet but consequential: pulling the arm caused the lower piece to rise; releasing it drew the arm back into the body's hollow. The object moved. It responded. It had an interior. Where the first object offered the children forms they could read (the human, the bird, the enclosure) this one was built to resist premature reading. Its deliberate semantic openness was not absence of design but a different kind of design: an invitation to cognitive work rather than recognition (Egan, 1988), constructed so that material properties would generate associations rather than confirm them. During the exploration phase the children's engagement was more investigative and tentative than in the first session, as though the object required time before it would yield. When contributions began, the narrative did not settle quickly on a single figure or world. It arrived through contact, turn by turn.

The fabric cavity, when one child's hand moved inside it, became a nest. When another child performed the same gesture several turns later, it became a threshold: entering, going inside a household. The same zone, handled identically, held two distinct narrative possibilities without contradiction, because the story had grown around both. The object's spatial depth made this possible; its ambiguity made it necessary. Children generated meaning not despite the object's abstraction but through it, their contributions remaining materially grounded even as the narrative expanded into territory the object had not literally suggested (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007; Gallagher, 2017). The kinetic mechanism (the arm, the string, the responsive lower form) entered the story only after the children had established a world in which such movement could signify something. Material properties did not dictate the narrative; they were read through it, and in being read, extended it.

As in the first session, the object's mnemonic function became structurally evident across the arc of the workshop. Children operated within the narrative framework the artefact had helped to preserve, referencing encoded zones without tactile re-verification, the haptic token carrying sequential history across turns and across speakers (Hutchins, 1995; Wegner, 1987). Collaborative repair operated through material re-anchoring: when a contribution diverged from the collective arc, the child who followed would return to a zone already carrying shared meaning and draw the story back, not correcting but continuing, the repair folded into the logic of the protocol (Sawyer, 2003). Every child contributed at every turn. The story that emerged across the session was one that no single participant could have authored alone, and one that could only be fully retold by someone who had held the object from the beginning.