Realizations & re-mediations: Enabling expression and interaction in collective embodied activities for children with disabilities

Abstract

This study examines the design, implementation, and iterative refinement of a technology-facilitated embodied learning environment within Camp Expression, a reverse-inclusion summer camp for elementary-aged children with moderate-to-severe disabilities impacting communication. Drawing on sociocultural and critical disability perspectives, we identify how a series of embodied activity designs posed key barriers to campers' participation, including challenges related to abstraction between virtual and physical spaces, supporting campers' navigation of control, routine, and choice, and difficulties in fostering peer collaboration. Utilizing participatory co-design methodologies and insights from paraprofessional expertise, we rapidly and iteratively re-mediated our activity designs to serve the camp mission of fostering creative expression and opportunities for prosocial inter-camper interactions. Findings highlight how iterative co-design practices enabled rapid-iterative changes to the technology, environment, and facilitation of these activities to reduce disabling barriers to participation, be responsive to campers' needs and desires, and ultimately cultivate opportunities for more meaningful and rich expression and interaction. This work contributes to the learning sciences by demonstrating how designers of technology-facilitated embodied learning environments might center critiques and alterations around that which can (and should) be changed - the design without coming at the cost of learner dignity.