This paper reflects on a slow-motion video clip of the hands of three young children as they play with toys in the sand tray. It foregrounds sand and toys that are handled, as well as hands that grasp and relinquish things. Through this movement of hands that tug and pull at things, it explores how things animate bodies, and how this produces the…

Toddlers learn more about the world from picture books with photographs instead of drawings, but commercial books often have tactile features such as flaps that may counterintuitively hinder learning. This study tested how lift-the-flap features in a commercial picture book of first words affected 2-year-olds' (N = 32) learning of a new word for…

Education involves the engagement of the full range of the senses in the accomplishment of tasks and the learning of knowledge and skills. However both in pedagogical practices and in the process of educational research, there has been a tendency to privilege the visual. To explore these issues, detailed sensory ethnographic fieldwork was…

This paper presents findings from a qualitative UK study exploring the social practices of schoolchildren visiting an interactive science discovery centre. It is promoted as a place for "learning through doing", but the multi-modal, ethnographic methods adopted suggest that children were primarily engaged in (1) sensory pleasure-taking…

This article considers the implications of a small-scale research project, undertaken by the authors, which used the example of the Massage in Schools Programme (a simple peer massage programme) to ascertain whether the planned use of touch-based activity can support the growth of social and emotional skills in the primary classroom. Such claims…

One hundred and thirty-three preclinical medical students participated in 24 focus groups over the period 2007-2009 at Durham University. Focus groups were conducted to ascertain whether or not medical students found body painting anatomical structures to be an educationally beneficial learning activity. Data were analyzed using a grounded theory…

We investigate how vision affects haptic performance when task-relevant visual cues are reduced or excluded. The task was to remember the spatial location of six landmarks that were explored by touch in a tactile map. Here, we use specially designed spectacles that simulate residual peripheral vision, tunnel vision, diffuse light perception, and…

This article considers the touching, or rather, not touching, of children and young people in professional settings. Some have argued that many schools and other childcare environments are becoming "no touch" zones. Formal guidelines in the UK are centrally concerned with "child protection" issues, and "force and…

This article describes the work of a group of professionals in the United Kingdom known as the VIEW Braille Literacy Committee, committed to the development of teaching braille. Members meet each school term and have had the support of the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) in realizing numerous projects aimed at improving access to…