Object Lessons

Object Lessons
Author: Sarah Anne Carter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2018-07-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190225041

Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World examines the ways material things--objects and pictures--were used to reason about issues of morality, race, citizenship, and capitalism, as well as reality and representation, in the nineteenth-century United States. For modern scholars, an "object lesson" is simply a timeworn metaphor used to describe any sort of reasoning from concrete to abstract. But in the 1860s, object lessons were classroom exercises popular across the country. Object lessons helped children to learn about the world through their senses--touching and seeing rather than memorizing and repeating--leading to new modes of classifying and comprehending material evidence drawn from the close study of objects, pictures, and even people. In this book, Sarah Carter argues that object lessons taught Americans how to find and comprehend the information in things--from a type-metal fragment to a whalebone sample. Featuring over fifty images and a full-color insert, this book offers the object lesson as a new tool for contemporary scholars to interpret the meanings of nineteenth-century material, cultural, and intellectual life.

Science, Technologies and Material Culture in the History of Education

Science, Technologies and Material Culture in the History of Education
Author: Heather Ellis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2020-05-18
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0429784163

Developed out of a 2015 conference of the History of Education Society, UK, this book explores the interconnections between the histories of science, technologies and material culture, and the history of education. The contributions express a shared concern over the extent to which the history of science and technology and the history of education are too frequently written about separately from each other despite being intimately connected. This state of affairs, they suggest, is linked to broader divisions in the history of knowledge, which has, for many years, been carved up into sections reflective of the academic subject divisions that structure modern universities and higher education in the West. Most noticeably this has occurred with the history of science, but more recently the history of humanities has been divided as well. The contributions to this volume demonstrate the diversity and originality of research currently being conducted into the connections between the history of science and the history of education. The importance of objects in teaching and their value as pedagogical tools emerges as a particularly significant area of research located at the intersection between the two fields of enquiry. Indeed, it is the materiality of education, a focus on the use of objects, pedagogical practices and particular spaces, which seems to offer some of the most promising avenues for exploring further the relationship between the histories of science and education. This book was originally published as a special issue of the History of Education.