An Exploratory Study of the Uses of a Multisensory Map—With Visually Impaired Children
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Design of the Prototype
2.1. Process
2.2. General Setup
2.3. Interaction Principles
2.4. Map
Tangibles
- housing: a farm, a building, two medium- and three small-sized houses;
- shops: a grocery store, a bank, a restaurant and a supermarket;
- services: two post offices and two schools of different sizes;
- infrastructure: an airport, two planes;
- green spaces: fields, parks and trees;
- historical points of interest: churches, tombs, war memorial;
2.5. Olfactory and Flavor Cues
- Similarity to something children had smelled during a previous field trip;
- Familiarity i.e., cues that all children are expected to have experienced in their daily lives;
- Or unknown cues that could introduce new experiences and meaning. Some cues were direct associations (e.g., colza oil for colza fields), others were metaphors (e.g., goat cheese for the farm).
3. Methods: Study Design
3.1. Context
Ethics
3.2. Research Questions
- How can children best be supported in making sense of multisensory material and how can it be integrated more often? What can we learn about children’s meaning-making processes when using smell and taste in the classroom for geography courses?
- Does multisensory material allow for more connections to be drawn between children’s lives, geography field-trips, and the classroom?
- How are these activities valued by pupils and teacher? Can this prototype be used to support collaboration in children with diverse sensory perceptions and diverse background?
3.3. Activity Design
3.4. Participants
3.5. Procedure
3.6. Analysis
- 1:41 h of video from the third lesson of the sequence (see Appendix C);
- Three interviews with the teacher: one before the three lessons to define the content, two after the lesson presented here. These last two interviews investigated among other things her assessment of learning outcomes;
- Semi-guided interviews with the children, conducted after this study. We discussed the session, what they remembered from it and the goals of learning (this last topic was useful for understanding how they perceived this unit compared to their other school experiences).
- Broad phases in the lesson: subtasks, moments of switching from a theme to another;
- Modes of interaction: overall classroom setting including the types of interactions with the map, speaker, utterance, gestures, gaze, olfactory representation, gustatory representation, and tangibles. Here, gaze is mainly denoted by body orientation, which suggests efforts to listen, focus on manipulation, etc.
4. Findings and Discussion
4.1. Smell and Taste: (in)Congruities
or, in other words, less space for individuals. C2’s initial answer was a reference to a bodily and personal experience, but it is the smell of rubber that makes it fit into a larger pattern Let’s note the pollution due to agricultural activities was not discussed. It creates a false dichotomies between cities and countryside, or culture and nature. However, this should be understood as a first step to understand the link between human activities and pollution, which harnesses children’s beliefs about the difference between the countryside and cities, enabling appropriation. Here, the congruity between the experiences and the representation in the classroom is very visible: C2 discussed the lack of space as affecting the ability to breathe—When manipulating the rubber C5 turned his head away to signify disgust, and C1 agitated his hands under his nose as if he was dissipating the odor. This is a particularly evocative representation of pollution. It is also an unpleasant one, which might be a limit of this approach (see Section 5).C5: “it smells like cars”C2: “because there are more cars, because there are more humans”,
4.2. Reconfiguring Space
4.3. Making the Classroom Pervasive to Children’s Lives
4.3.1. Children’s Spatial Lives
4.3.2. Children’s Emotional and Social Lives
4.4. Opportunities for Citizenship Education
5. Perspectives and Future Work
6. Conclusions
Author Contributions
Funding
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
Appendix A. Timeline of Design Iterations
Appendix B. Elements to Understand Meaning Construction during Field-Trips
Time | 011831 | 011850 | 011854 | 011907 | 011928 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Classroom setting | C2 interacts with the interactive map, assisted by teacher, C3 observes C2, others are seated, first author stands up | Idem | Idem | Idem, researcher introducing rubber as an olfactory resource to C1 | Idem, researcher presents the rubber to C3, which leads C1 and C3 to engage in a discussion |
Speaker | C1 | First author | C1 | C1 | C1 |
Utterance | “in Toulouse, there are services, a hospital and so on. In the countryside, there are no hospitals.” | “so what feels different in the city and the countryside?” | “space is reduced” | “What is that? Oooh it’s rubber” | “the pollution!” |
Comment | He repeats a remark made earlier by the teacher | emphasis on “feels” (which in French is a synonym for smell) | - | - | - |
Gestures | hands below the table | move around the classroom | - | - | points upward |
Gaze | turns regularly towards and away his classmates | nothing in particular | - | - | follows the olfactory representation, turns towards C3 |
Olfactory representation | - | - | - | - | rubber |
Gustatory representation | - | - | - | - | - |
Tangible representation | - | - | - | - | - |
Appendix C. Pedagogical Unit
Appendix C.1. Learning Objectives
- Themes. Describe, schematize and compare different types of human environments (e.g., urban, suburban or rural), and their organization (e.g., in terms of population, economical activities, or infrastructures); understand the different kinds of transportation infrastructures (local, regional, national);
- Skills. Developing the understanding of environmental cues; Map reading; following an itinerary; constructing the itinerary followed during a class trip; work collaboratively by formulating hypotheses and discuss them; Discover new technologies (the prototypes);
- Content. Learning about regional geography, especially the regional capital;
- More broadly, developing general culture and vocabulary, and fostering engagement with geography.
Appendix C.2. Organization
- First lesson. The first lesson was a field-trip. It focused primarily on developing the understanding of environmental cues and covered all the themes cited above.
- Second lesson. This lesson took place in the special education center. The children freely explored the tangibles designed for the pedagogical unit. The teacher reminded the children about the field trip. Pupils were then instructed to elaborate on hypotheses about what each tangible represented, before discussing these hypotheses with the rest of the class. The teacher provided cues when needed. These cues were of different types: associations with previously explored tangibles (e.g., “it is related to the one you’ve guessed before”), with previous class trips, or with everyday scenarios (e.g., “this is where you go when you have to send a letter”). This lesson was preparation for the third lesson and an occasion to discuss the themes again.
- Third lesson. The third lesson was conducted in the classroom and is described in this paper. It focused on synthesizing the elements to be acquired in the pedagogical unit.
Appendix D. Structure of the Activity
Introduction | Eating a pastry, setting the goal: synthesizing the differences between human habitats and their reasons |
Body | Smelling grass and eating strawberries |
Discovery of the map | |
Associating the three smellables/tastables with different areas of the map | |
Finding different types of roads on the map | |
Discussing the transportation infrastructure (e.g., national/regional roads) | |
Discussing the transportation infrastructure (national/regional roads; canals) | |
Smelling rubber | |
Discussing pollution and its causes | |
Synthesizing differences between farming and industry, countryside and cities | |
Discussing the evolutions of work and how they shape cities | |
Discussing the evolutions of work and how they shape cities | |
Smelling colza and cheese (returning to the village) | |
Synthesizing the similarities of structures between all habitats, starting by the village (e.g., church, town hall) | |
Licking an envelope | |
Discussing communication services (introducing the term infrastructure) through the example of postal services | |
Conclusion | Synthesis the concepts learned, asking pupils for feedback on the lesson |
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Id | Gender | Age | Grade | Impairments | SES |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
C1 | M | 10 | 3rd grade | Blindness with light perception, motor, memory difficulties and psychological impairment | Disadvantaged |
C2 | M | 11 | 5th grade | Blindness with light perception | Disadvantaged |
C3 | M | 11 | 5th grade | Severe visual impairment and dyslexia | Middle class |
C4 | M | 10 | 4th grade | Severe visual and hearing impairment | Advantaged |
C5 | M | 11 | 4th grade | Blindness with light perception, multiple learning difficulties | Disadvantaged |
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Brulé, E.; Bailly, G.; Brock, A.; Gentès, A.; Jouffrais, C. An Exploratory Study of the Uses of a Multisensory Map—With Visually Impaired Children. Multimodal Technol. Interact. 2018, 2, 36. https://doi.org/10.3390/mti2030036
Brulé E, Bailly G, Brock A, Gentès A, Jouffrais C. An Exploratory Study of the Uses of a Multisensory Map—With Visually Impaired Children. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction. 2018; 2(3):36. https://doi.org/10.3390/mti2030036
Chicago/Turabian StyleBrulé, Emeline, Gilles Bailly, Anke Brock, Annie Gentès, and Christophe Jouffrais. 2018. "An Exploratory Study of the Uses of a Multisensory Map—With Visually Impaired Children" Multimodal Technologies and Interaction 2, no. 3: 36. https://doi.org/10.3390/mti2030036
APA StyleBrulé, E., Bailly, G., Brock, A., Gentès, A., & Jouffrais, C. (2018). An Exploratory Study of the Uses of a Multisensory Map—With Visually Impaired Children. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, 2(3), 36. https://doi.org/10.3390/mti2030036