Staging nature in twentieth-century teacher education and classrooms

At the end of the nineteenth century, biology as an academic discipline was as young as its corresponding school subject. Now nature itself was analysed as a complex (eco)system consisting of animals, plants, and man. The dramatic conceptual shift and subsequent development of school curricula called for teaching aids representing the new perspective on nature. The paper uses the different types of teaching aids as “index fossils” (Andreas Ludwig) of a specific material culture of education. Thereby we follow a central organising element of contemporary educational concepts around 1900: we will place the teaching aids on a continuum, reaching from “almost real” representations by taxidermists, to abstract schematics on wallcharts, or to wild life in moving pictures to describe and reflect powerful and lasting forms of vividness representing nature

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