Tactile Maps and the Geographical Reasoning of Blind Youth and Adults in Sobral, Ceará, Brazil
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tactile cartography and the use of tactile teaching resources play a fundamental role in building the geographical reasoning of blind and low-vision students. These resources provide a sensory representation of space, allowing students to explore and understand geographical elements through touch. In this context, this study addresses the complexity of blind students’ cognitive processes when they conceive of geographical space based on the principles of analogy, connection, differentiation, distribution, extension, location and order. In view of this, the aim of this article is to evaluate the challenges and strategies related to the application of tactile cartographic resources, through the use of spatial representations on a local scale with visually impaired students at the Professora Cecy Cialdini Youth and Adult Education Center (CEJA), in the municipality of Sobral, Ceará, Brazil. To this end, three tactile teaching aids depicting local spaces were made using craft techniques and applied in four stages through planned pedagogical practices. With regard to the principles, we concluded that those of location and extension were the most easily assimilated, while those of distribution and spatial order required more time and effort on the part of some students. We therefore conclude that adapting teaching resources to tactile cartography represents a significant step forward in promoting geography education for all, helping to build a more equal and inclusive society. Finally, it is hoped that this work will encourage the adoption of accessible methodologies, promoting a more inclusive, meaningful and transformative geographical education.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".