Empowerment-Based Practice Toward Vocational Rehabilitation Among Adult Leaners Who are Deaf-Blind

Traditionally vocational rehabilitation has as its goal providing services to support individuals with disabilities to achieve outcomes that relate to employment and independent functioning so that they may live self-sufficient and empowered lives. The current research discusses models of empowerment among varied marginalized groups identifying its components and dimensions, but little is known about how learners perceive and experience empowerment. This qualitative case study brought the voices of 18 adult learners who are deaf-blind into the conversation and examined the instructional practices and experiences that were reportedly empowering among learners while participating in vocational rehabilitation. The study revealed learners’ interpretations of their experiences, motivations, insights, and challenges during their vocational rehabilitation journey. The study illuminated how learners perceived empowerment and identified six elements of the experience. In addition, learners shed light on six elements of the learning context that were worthy of consideration among learners and practitioners for optimizing the learning experience. Emergent themes surfaced regarding the relationship between empowerment-based practice and transformative learning. The change reportedly undergone by learners encompassed the whole person: affective, cultural, social, practical, political, and spiritual domains. Preliminary investigation into the distinctive pathways to empowerment among deaf-blind adult learners provided a unique perspective by learners on how they made meaning and navigated their new reality of combined vision and hearing loss. Recommendations to practitioners and learners are derived from the 18 voices of learners who participated in the study. The study also revealed a need to further investigate the link between transformative learning and empowerment-based practice and how these two theoretical frameworks might inform one another with implications for practice

Interdisciplinary Insights for Digital Touch Communication

Communication is increasingly moving beyond ‘ways of seeing’ to ‘ways of feeling’. This Open Access book provides social design insights and implications for HCI research and design exploring digitally mediated touch communication. It offers a socially orientated map to help navigate the complex social landscape of digitally mediated touch for communication: from everyday touch-screens, tangibles, wearables, haptics for virtual reality, to the tactile internet of skin. Drawing on literature reviews, new case-study vignettes, and exemplars of digital touch, the book examines the major social debates provoked by digital touch, and investigates social themes central to the communicative potential and societal consequences of digital touch: · Communication environments, capacities and practices · Norms associations and expectations · Presence, absence and connection · Social imaginaries of digital touch · Digital touch ethics and values The book concludes with a discussion of the significance of social understanding and methods in the context of Interdisciplinary collaborations to explore touch, towards the design of digital touch communication, ‘ways of feeling’, that are useable, appropriate, ethical and socially aware

Social Touch

Interpersonal or social touch is an intuitive and powerful way to express and communicate emotions, comfort a friend, bond with teammates, comfort a child in pain, and soothe someone who is stressed. If there is one thing that the current pandemic is showing us, it is that social distancing can make some people crave physical interaction through social touch. The notion of “skin-hunger” has become tangible for many.Social touch differs at a functional and anatomical level from discriminative touch, and has clear effects at physiological, emotional, and behavioural levels. Social touch is a topic in psychology (perception, emotion, behaviour), neuroscience (neurophysiological pathways), computer science (mediated touch communication), engineering (haptic devices), robotics (social robots that can touch), humanities (science and technology studies), and sociology (the social implications of touch). Our current scientific knowledge of social touch is scattered across disciplines and not yet adequate for the purpose of meeting today's challenges of connecting human beings through the mediating channel of technology

Multisensory Perception and Learning: Linking Pedagogy, Psychophysics, and Human–Computer Interaction

In this review, we discuss how specific sensory channels can mediate the learning of properties of the environment. In recent years, schools have increasingly been using multisensory technology for teaching. However, it still needs to be sufficiently grounded in neuroscientific and pedagogical evidence. Researchers have recently renewed understanding around the role of communication between sensory modalities during development. In the current review, we outline four principles that will aid technological development based on theoretical models of multisensory development and embodiment to foster in-depth, perceptual, and conceptual learning of mathematics. We also discuss how a multidisciplinary approach offers a unique contribution to development of new practical solutions for learning in school. Scientists, engineers, and pedagogical experts offer their interdisciplinary points of view on this topic. At the end of the review, we present our results, showing that one can use multiple sensory inputs and sensorimotor associations in multisensory technology to improve the discrimination of angles, but also possibly for educational purposes. Finally, we present an application, the ‘RobotAngle’ developed for primary (i.e., elementary) school children, which uses sounds and body movements to learn about angles

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand: taxonomy, review and perspectives

In the last decade, we have witnessed a drastic change in the form factor of audio and vision technologies, from heavy and grounded machines to lightweight devices that naturally fit our bodies. However, only recently, haptic systems have started to be designed with wearability in mind. The wearability of haptic systems enables novel forms of communication, cooperation, and integration between humans and machines. Wearable haptic interfaces are capable of communicating with the human wearers during their interaction with the environment they share, in a natural and yet private way. This paper presents a taxonomy and review of wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand, focusing on those systems directly addressing wearability challenges. The paper also discusses the main technological and design challenges for the development of wearable haptic interfaces, and it reports on the future perspectives of the field. Finally, the paper includes two tables summarizing the characteristics and features of the most representative wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand

Haptics: Science, Technology, Applications

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human Haptic Sensing and Touch Enabled Computer Applications, EuroHaptics 2020, held in Leiden, The Netherlands, in September 2020. The 60 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 111 submissions. The were organized in topical sections on haptic science, haptic technology, and haptic applications. This year's focus is on accessibility