[C] IDC’2019 Paper: Co-designing Inclusive Multisensory Story Mapping with Children with Mixed Visual Abilities

Abstract: Story mapping is used in schools to promote children’s understanding of stories and narrative structure. As a collaborative activity, it can support collective meaning-making and creativity, and facilitate group interaction. However, most techniques used in primary schools rely on visual materials, which creates a barrier to learning for children with visual impairments (VI). To address this, we set out to design a collaborative story mapping tool with a group of children with mixed visual abilities and their teaching assistants. Using co-design approaches over ten workshops, we designed and prototyped different ideas for engaging children in storytelling and design. We present our co-design process and findings, the resulting story mapping system, and a set of design recommendations for making story mapping more inclusive. We outline how using multisensory elements can facilitate creativity and collaboration to help children with mixed visual abilities create and share stories together, and support academic and social inclusion of VI children in mainstream classrooms.

Citations:

Cullen C., Metatla O., Co-designing Inclusive Multisensory Story Mapping with Children with Mixed Visual Abilities. IDC’2019, Jun2 12-15, Idaho, USA.