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SUMMARY:The elephant in the room: presence\, practice and pachyderms in Vi
 ctorian education - Melanie Keene (Homerton College\, Cambridge)
DTSTART:20150518T120000Z
DTEND:20150518T131500Z
UID:TALK58977@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Margaret Carlyle
DESCRIPTION:Throughout the 19th century\, object lessons had been celebrat
 ed as the most novel and effective way of entraining young minds and bodie
 s with vital scientific skills and knowledge. Basing educational experienc
 es around particular artefacts\, it was argued\, provided unparalleled opp
 ortunities for visual appeal\, sensory investigations\, and cohesive story
 telling. By the last decades of the century\, 'object-teaching' became a s
 tandard part of school curricula around the globe\; yet with its expansion
  in scope and topics the approach was a victim of its own success: inspect
 ors bemoaned the farcical recital of properties that accompanied the prese
 ntation of each object\; government circulars denounced 'information lesso
 ns' which privileged storing the memory with 'interesting facts' over 'fir
 sthand' knowledge. In this talk I will explore the promises and problems o
 f this type of pedagogy as it entered the classroom. By taking as my focus
  the elephant\, I will reveal the limitations of teaching all subjects thr
 ough object lessons (the elephant in the room was the fact that there was 
 no elephant in the room at all)\; the visual\, metonymic\, and imaginative
  strategies deployed by teachers and authors to circumvent such limitation
 s\; and how wider natural historical and imperial meanings were put to wor
 k.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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