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.