Feevale University, University Lusíada of Lisboa and the Polythecnic Institute of Leiria, in Portugal, have held together an intercontinental research study aiming to collaborate with the inclusive education of people with disabilities. The project SENSeBOOK – Multi-sensory Books, supported by Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (Capes), expect to develop a methodology to create multiformat books kits, that is to say, for multi-sensory reading.

Through the Inclusive Design, based on information and communication technologies, audiovisual adaptation strategies and alternative communication, they are kits to allow access for everyone, especially for people with disabilities like blindness, deafness or of intellectual type. Coordinated by the Graduate Degree Program in Cultural Diversity and Social Inclusion at Feevale’s Professor Regina Heidrich, the project prospects a bilateral exchange relationship between these two countries related to undergraduate courses and sandwich PhD program.  

The Scientific Research Initiation scholars, Claudia Elisete Kellermann, of Design, and Joanna Wottrich, of Psychology, are spending a year in the Portuguese institutions, which stand out on studies of social inclusion. Claudia travels on Monday, 27th, and Joana, on Saturday, 25th. The sandwich undergraduate program enables the academic to attend partially a course in a foreign university, providing knowledge exchange within institutions. Joana aims to develop a project that integrates her area, that is to say Psychology, with children with special needs – to the extent that compelled her to focus on the studies developed by Professor Regina. ‘I'm with great expectations and highly motivated to study’, she celebrates.

Claudia, on her time, is traveling with her husband Paulo Martinho and her 9-year-old son Bernardo, (who is going to studying there, too), and also intends to transform the ‘A Turma da Castanheira’ books series, which are stories focused on environmental education she wrote herself, into tactile publications and in books for deaf people. ‘It will be a wonderful experience: studying at another University that is a reference in social inclusion. We will be able to share knowledge with our colleagues back in Brazil and develop our Final Course Paper projects’, she states.

Professors who are collaborators with the studies: Celia Sousa, focusing on the development of solutions of augmentative communication and non-verbal communication on the integration of multiformat kits, and Paul Maldonado, an expert in development of user-centered interface design (UID) approaching user-experience design (UXD) and communicative design.

As mentioned by professor Regina Heidrich, this is an opportunity to develop a methodology that, in future, could be shared with public schools. ‘This project will contribute to the equality of people with disabilities in public schools, promoting the development of students and teachers’ human potential,’ she explains.