“If you Really, Really, Want to Know it You Have to Touch it” - Researching the role of touch in children’s science education

Whilst the sense of touch, or haptics, is commonly recognised as a crucial means of communication, social interaction, and sense-making, vital for exploring the world around us, its role in science education has been less clear, and less explored compared to written-visual and verbal-auditory modalities of learning. This likely reflects the dominance of cognitive paradigms in science education, which prioritise visual representations and conceptual abstractions, and largely underplaying the embodied nature of cognition grounded inmovement and sensory experiences. Addressing this gap, this paper draws on a study involving 160 children aged 6-11 across six primary schools, based in Scotland, UK. Fieldnotes, video and audio recordings, and photographic data were collected during 47 observations of children interacting indoors with a series of commonly found natural artefacts, and over the course of eight out-door workshops in the school grounds. Analysis revealed the complex ways in which younger learners experience, explore, and place value in touch, their awareness and readiness to touch in science learning, and the ways in which haptic experiences supported learning through action, verbal communication, and gesture. Findings disclose the less noticeable, affective and relational dimensions of scientific inquiry mediated by materiality and touch, and contribute to widening awareness of the value of sensorial inquiry in science education.