Tactile learning: employing the senses

Inspired by the many object and tactile learning presentations from our 2025 conference, I was determined to leave behind that pandemic legacy of short, unimaginative, online, information literacy lectures. I shook myself down and threw away the old PowerPoint and here follows a success story of a joyful workshop with second year Interior Architecture students.

In particular, I was inspired by Billie Coxhead (UAL), Fiona Dowling and Morwenna Peters’ (UWE) talk So you want to teach with materials? Developing materials literacy using object-based learning methods. I began my journey by playing around with the toolkit which they so generously shared with us. I focused on the cards relating to information literacy as I was intending to use this method to meet established learning outcomes for library workshops.

Without access to a materials library I started to gather things from around the home, including various Festival of Britain items (some of you may remember these, including the teapot, from the Glasgow conference) various sewing tools, little used Christmas gifts; things from the garage including a sparkplug, empty signwriting paint bottle, ancient folding ruler and a woodwork tool to help make the perfect angle; things from the “free to a good home” table at work, including tinsel and a weird metal disk with a spooky illustration.  

Alongside this buoyant enthusiasm, I was invited to participate in a research project concerning the seminal architecture text, The Eyes of the Skin by Juhani Pallasmaa. (I’ll save telling you about that for another time.)  Pleased to see that it was a short volume, I decided to read it on my hovercraft commute. Wow! Although I found part 1 required all of my attention and was, perhaps, not best suited to the commute, I made it through to part 2 which I just wanted to read out loud. So, for a different reason, was also not suitable for the commute! However, it connected perfectly with teaching keywords, enhanced by the “Use your senses” card from the toolkit.

Then the Universe aligned; The Eyes of the Skin was prominent on the reading list for the second year Interior Architecture students that I was planning to use as my guinea pigs for my box of things workshop. As the students came into the classroom, they chose an object (interesting to see what they chose) and started to tell the person/people near them why they had chosen it – immersing them into the workshop before we had even begun.  

I introduced the session and moved swiftly on to the “Keywords” slide asking them, one step at a time, to:

1. Describe the object in words
2. Describe it again using different words
3. Swap the object with someone else, can they add any extra words?
4. Swap it back again.

We talked about how discussing research with other people might help us to see things from an alternative perspective to our own, leading to questions, curiosity and different avenues of exploration.

Then we moved on to the “Use your senses,” again, revealing one question at a time:

1. Describe it [your object] in more detail
2. What does it look like?
3. Close your eyes, what does it feel like?
4. What does it smell like, does it remind you of anything?
5. Listen to it as you shake or tap it, what sound does it make?
6. You might not want to actually taste it, but can you imagine what it might taste like?
7. Does it evoke any other senses beyond these five primary senses?

If you’ve read The Eyes of the Skin, you can see where I’m going with this one!  The students really got into it at this point. I was surprised to see so many closed eyes and hear the laughter at the non-tasting of the objects.  We discussed how interrogating a research question in this way could help arrive at some interesting ways of searching for possibly unique perspectives on a topic. Could this give us the option of taking a more personal and engaging approach to a topic?

Then my desire was fulfilled, I read aloud a passage from the book, this one I think, but there were many I could have chosen:

It is pleasurable to press a door handle shining from the thousands of hands that have entered the door before us; the clean shimmer of ageless wear has turned into an image of welcome and hospitality. The door handle is the handshake of the building. The tactile sense connects us with time and tradition: through impressions of touch we shake the hands of countless generations (Pallasmaa, 2012, p. 62).

They listened intently like children at a storytelling event, gripped by the content and wanting to know more, a vibe seldom felt in a library lecture!  Off they went, without instruction, searching the library catalogue to find the book. They were hooked.

To round off the keyword section of the lecture I added an AI element – something to do for homework (and something I had in reserve in case the box of things didn’t go down so well):

1. Photograph your object creatively
2. Upload it to Copilot
3. Ask Copilot to describe the photograph of your object.

I had prepared an example to share and we discussed what AI could bring and what the individual and the group perspective could add to the research perspective.  They were pretty sure it wouldn’t be able to smell and taste the object! I’d like to think it gave the students confidence in their own voice.

Once we had tested our keywords on the resources and reached the end of the 2 hour workshop, I asked them if they had enjoyed working with the objects. They said they had. To me it was apparent because they stayed engaged with the session throughout.

I tried it on a few other classes and it worked but perhaps not quite as well as this one. Here, there was a strong link between the exercise, a key text and the subject in general.  As Billie, Fiona and Morwenna had shared at the conference, it is, indeed, important to be clear why you are taking this object-based approach. 

Report by: Greta Friggens | University of Portsmouth