Cross-modal Interactive Tools for Inclusive Learning

Students with special education needs are traditionally placed in specialized schools where they are provided with facilities and trained staff to accommodate their needs. Today, there is a shift in government policies towards providing support for equalisation of education opportunity, embodying UNESCO's Salamanca World Statement which considers "Inclusion and participation [as] essential to human dignity [...] enjoyment and exercise of human rights" (UNESCO 1994). This shift underlines the national agenda for integrating more visually impaired children in mainstream schools and reducing exclusion, which is often the result of unmet special needs.

According to a recent report by the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), approximately 70 per cent of visually impaired children in the UK are educated in mainstream settings. This often takes the form of one or two learners in a class of fully sighted peers. Issues related to how best to modify learning materials as well as how to manage group work to nurture an adequate learning environment for all is challenging in such settings. For instance, a number of curriculum standards of core components in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) emphasise the importance of graphic literacy to establish a foundation for future practices. Teachers in mainstream schools therefore have to resort to modifying curriculum resources that include graphics to make them accessible to visually impaired learners by using physical tools such as Braille, tactile diagrams or heat-raised images. However, these tools are designed to be used by visually impaired learners alone and not by their sighted peers, and thus can end up forcing them to learn as isolated individuals and exclude from group learning activities. In addition, as classrooms become more computerised, visually impaired learners are likely to face with more barriers since they mostly rely on screen-readers to access computers and these can be inadequate for accessing graphics and can inhibit meaningful collaboration with sighted peers. If not carefully studied and designed, technology can have detrimental effects on the inclusion of visually impaired learners in mainstream schools, particularly in contexts where they interact with sighted peers, and can lead to drastic effects on their lives as adults. For instance, jobs that require data analysis, including careers in STEM, often encode information using graphics and require teamwork and collaboration. Learning how to interpret and construct graphics as well as how to effectively engage with peers should, and generally does, begin during a student's basic education.

The underlying problem is that current technological support for learning in mixed classrooms emphasise accessibility over inclusion, targeting individual rather than social learning and group work. Focus is thus placed on an individual's disability and not on the variety of abilities present in a social context of group learning involving students, teachers and technology.

The aim of this Early Career fellowship is to research and develop interactive learning tools to make mixed classrooms more inclusive of visually impaired students. Non-visual modalities (e.g. audio, gestures, haptic and tactile feedback) have already shown potential benefit to support accessible interactions, but there are still limitations in their applicability in real world settings, such as issues with cross-modal effects when groups work together using different senses. The developed tools will focus on gaps in technological support for accommodating national curriculum standards by combining participatory design activities with empirical research into cross-modal interaction to find out how different senses can be integrated with visual capabilities. The tools will be validated in classroom settings to find out how they can improve group learning activities and teaching practices.

The outcomes of the project will increase the inclusion of students with visual impairments in mixed classrooms. Students and teachers taking part in the various design activities and studies during the course of the project will feel immediate impact through exposure to new technologies for inclusive collaboration. I will achieve this by involving the Sensory Support Services and the King's Copse Primary School when recruiting participants, as well as existing links with other user groups and bodies such as the RNIB to disseminate the work to the educational sector. Findings from this research will provide practical examples of how it will impact teaching practices and group learning activities. In the near term this impact will be felt by increased inclusion in mainstream schools, and in the medium term findings from this project will impact teams working with collaborative tools in a range of domains. The user-centred approach used in this fellowship will help raise awareness of the conducted research through inclusion of target user groups in research and design activities. I will also raise awareness through publicity in national and international specialist and mainstream media.

In the long term the project will have social and economic benefit to the UK, as it will allow a wider range of people to engage in collaborative work. It will also benefit the general populace with the design of more effective cross-modal collaboration support for situations when modalities are restricted (e.g. distributed and mobile teamwork). Additionally, it will contribute to making the UK an example of best practice for inclusion in education and teamwork. The UK commercial sector will benefit from this research through the advancement of knowledge in collaborative technologies. Moreover, the software developed in this project will help improve the UK's position in the assistive technology market by opening up the collaboration domain. Furthermore, by increasing inclusion in collaborative work, there will be an increase in the efficiency of teamwork, and increased dissemination and sharing of knowledge. In order to achieve this, the deliverable software tools will be made available to UK companies and organizations free of charge through an open source license. Furthermore, experience in building cross-modal systems will be made publicly available through the open source community and academic papers which will provide the commercial and educational sectors with case studies of how to undertake such development. I will raise awareness of the developed software tools through public exhibitions and media channels.