Tactile Storying - Session 3

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

The third session departed from the Tactile Storying protocol established in the first two implementations. Rather than presenting a facilitator-constructed object for collective narration, this session was designed as a structural intervention: the children would build the object themselves before any narrative work began. Four blind and low-vision children were presented with eight small tactile objects of varying material qualities and a cylindrical wooden body with six Velcro-armed extensions, three on each side. The task was to negotiate which objects to attach to the body and how to arrange them. A maximum of six of the eight objects could be selected; combinations and placements were entirely the children's decision. No narrative frame was given in advance. The session had one constraint: make something together. The eight candidate objects were: a pillow piece, asymmetric in its fill, with a protrusion on one side that resisted even pressure; a bead sack, its surface yielding and shifting under the hand, open at the top; a vinyl piece, its strips bundled at one end, spreading under handling into something wing-like; a folded felt piece, five horizontal folds, each tubular and unfilled, like a collapsed accordion; a tentacle piece, a cone of felt with multiple cut extensions that splayed when handled; and a button strip, a doubled length of fabric stitched at three points, each stitch producing a button-shaped protrusion and a lateral opening that a finger could enter. These were not components of a predetermined design. They were occasions for haptic inquiry.

What followed was approximately an hour of collective sense-making in its own right, prior to and independent of any narrative. Each object passed between children, was explored individually and comparatively, and its material properties were subjected to debate. The button strip generated three successive interpretations before the group converged: eyes first, then a trap mechanism, then mouths, the final reading arrived at through one child's embodied demonstration of pushing fingers through the lateral openings, the argument made through the object itself rather than about it. The pillow piece's asymmetry became a functional distinction: the larger protrusion a venom sac, the smaller cavity anti-venom storage, the spatial logic of their proximity argued for and ratified collectively. The tentacle piece was read as tentacles, then a plant, then a camouflage structure, each reading building on rather than displacing the last, the object acquiring layered significance through cumulative handling (Merleau-Ponty, 1945; Noë, 2004).

The vinyl piece produced the session's most legible instance of participatory sense-making. One child read its spread as claws. Another read the same spread as wings. The child who had first said claws then took the object and flapped it, performing the alternative reading through the object's own material behaviour rather than arguing for it verbally. A third child followed with the same gesture. The group converged on wings not through discussion but through enactment, the object's flexibility and spread under handling becoming the argument itself. This was sense-making as Sheets-Johnstone (2011) describes movement: thinking in motion, the body's intelligence preceding and producing its articulation. The body assembly that followed was equally deliberate. Children reasoned spatially and narratively in the same gesture: the button strip and tentacle piece sharing a Velcro arm because they belonged to the head together; the bead sack placed at the lower end because its excretory function in the emerging story demanded it; the vinyl piece positioned between the pillow piece and the bead sack because the creature, as it was now being called, needed access to both flight and swimming while maintaining forward orientation. No facilitator proposed the creature frame. It arrived through the logic of the negotiation itself, the cylindrical body acquiring a directionality and a set of functions that cohered into something with a life, and then a name. The assembled object was not merely a construction. It was a materialised record of collective haptic sense-making: every attachment decision encoding a negotiated meaning, every placement carrying the weight of an argument that had been made through touch (Ingold, 2013; Malafouris, 2013).