Nature study in north america and australasia, 1890-1945: International connections and local implementations

Historical Records of Australian Science

Volumn 11, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 439-454

  Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0005199737     PISSN: 07273061     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1071/HR9971130439     Document Type: Article

References (105)

1. Two dissertations in education discuss the main figures in the American movement, with particular reference to educational theory: Tyree G. Minton, 'The History of the Nature-Study Movement and Its Role in the Development of Environmental Education' (EdD, University of Massachusetts, 1980)
2. and Richard R. Olmsted, 'The Nature-Study Movement in American Education' (EdD, Indiana University, 1967).
3. Traditional histories of education in the United States tend to be somewhat dismissive of Nature Study, including Lawrence A. Cremin's The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York, 1961).
4. Susan Faye Cannon, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (New York, 1978)
5. and R.W. Home, 'Humboldtian Science Revisited: An Australian Case Study', History of Science, 33 (1995), 1-22.
6. Wonderful illustrated maps of this effort are found in Jacques Brosse, Great Voyages of Discovery: Circumnavigators and Scientists, 1764-1843 (New York, 1983).
7. Considerable discussion of early Australian science is found throughout the issues of Historical Records of Australian Science as well as in R.W. Home, ed., Australian Science in the Making (Melbourne, 1988)
8. and Ann Mozley Moyal, 'A Bright and Savage Land': Scientists in Colonial Australia (Sydney, 1986).
9. Susan Sheets-Pyenson, Cathedrals of Science: The Development of Colonial Natural History during the Late Nineteenth Century (Kingston, Ontario, 1988);
10. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, 'Australian Museums of Natural History: Public Priorities and Scientific Initiatives in the Nineteenth Century', Historical Records of Australian Science, 5 (1983), 1-29.
11. Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selbourne (New York, 1847), Letter X to D. B.
12. David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (London, 1976).
13. John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge, 1994).
14. Lynn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, 1820-1870 (Garden City, NY, 1980).
15. Nicolette Scourse, The Victorians and Their Flowers (London, 1983). Also see U.C. Knoepflmacher and G.B. Tennyson, eds, Nature and the Victorian Imagination (Berkeley, California, 1977).
16. Lynn L. Merrill, The Romance of Victorian Natural History (New York, 1989). Somewhat similar concerns are addressed in the essays in James Paradis and Thomas Postlewait, eds, Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives (New York, 1981).
17. Anne Secord, 'Science in the Pub: Artisan Botanists in Early Nineteenth-Century Lancashire', History of Science, 32 (1994) 269-315
18. and 'Artisan Botany' in N. Jardine, J.A. Secord and E. C. Spary, Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 378-393.
19. Andreas Daum, 'Wissenschaftspopularisierung in Deutschland: Naturwissenschaften, Ö ffentlichkeit und bü rgerliche Gesellschaft, 1848-1914,' (Ph2i. Diss., Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitä t Mü nchen SS, 1996)
20. There has been recent attention paid to the importance of visual images used by those who contributed to natural history in the nineteenth century, including the well illustrated books by Peter S. Dance, The Art of Natural History: Animal Illustrators and Their Work (Woodstock, NY, 1978) and Ann Shelby Blum, Picturing Nature: American Nineteenth-Century Zoological Illustration (Princeton, NJ, 1993).
21. Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora's Daughters and Botany in England, 1760-1860 (Baltimore, 1996). Shteir makes clear that the over-riding theme was the capacity of such study to contribute to personal and family improvement rather than any public contribution through advancing science.
22. Elizabeth Keeney, The Botanizers: Amateur Scientists in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1992).
23. Willis Conner Sorensen, Brethren of the Net: American Entomology, 1840-1880 (Tuscaloosa, 1995).
24. Mark V. Barrow, 'Birds and Boundaries: Community, Practice, and Conservation in North American Ornithology, 1865-1935' (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1992).
25. See, for examples, Pamela Regis, Describing Early America: Bartram, Jefferson, Crevecoeur, and the Rhetoric of Natural History (DeKalb, Illinois, 1992);
26. Peter A. Fritzell, Nature Writing and America: Essays Upon a Cultural Type (Ames, Iowa, 1990);
27. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).
28. Among the best known is Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, 1967).
29. Ralph H. Lutts, The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science, and Sentiment (Golden, Colorado, 1990).
30. Vera Norwood, Made from This Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill, 1993);
31. Thomas Dunlap, Saving America's Wildlife: Ecology and the American Mind, 1850-1990 (Princeton, NJ, 1988);
32. and John F. Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation (New York, 1975).
33. Merrill, Heyday of Natural History, p. 15.
34. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, 'Parlors, Primers, and Public Schooling: Education for Science in Nineteenth-Century America', Isis, 81 (1990), 425-445.
35. This was claimed by organizer Harlan H. Ballard in his Handbook of the St. Nicholas Association, 2nd ed. (Lenox, Mass., 1884).
36. R.J.W. Selleck, The New Education, 1870-1914 (London, 1968).
37. Several leaders in this movement are discussed in Dorothy Rogers, Oswego: Fountainhead of Teacher Education (New York, 1961), while the implications for science are still best covered in the classic study by Orra Erwin Underhill, The Origins and Development of Elementary-School Science (Chicago, 1941).
38. Wilbur Jackman, Nature Study for the Common Schools (New York, 1894).
39. Minton, 'History of the Nature-Study Movement (op. cit. [n.1]), views Jackman as the embodiment of the connections being made between science teaching and the new educational psychology.
40. Anna Botsford Comstock, 'A Review of the Cornell Nature-Study Movement', Cornell School Leaflets, 17 (September, 1923), 41-44.
41. Also see Wayne E. Fuller, The Old Country School: The Story of Rural Education in the Midwest (Chicago, 1982).
42. Junior Naturalist Leaflet (July, 1903).
43. The Nature Study Handbook remains in print through Cornell University Press. The Cornell University activities are extensively documented in their archives and the movement is described in some detail in Comstock's own review (op. cit., n.27).
44. Sir William Macdonald was apparently a close friend of James Wilson Robertson, Commissioner of Education for Prince Edward Island, who came to head the Macdonald Institute at the Ontario Agricultural College at Guelf, Ontario.
45. See Herbert Francis Sherwood, 'Children of the Land: The Story of the Macdonald Movement in Canada', The Outlook, 10 (April 1910), 891-898.
46. The University of Guelf Archives have a fine collection of Nature Study materials relating to their programme, including the unusually helpful student records of Eveline Hockey.
47. For a description of the 1907 three-month summer class, see the Ontario Agricultural College Review, (1908), pp. 108-109.
48. The tendency is especially evident in the Hawke's Bay Education Board publication by William D. Morris entitled Man and Nature: Schemes in Nature Study and Science including Agriculture, Dairy Science, Elementary General Science, Home Science, Hygiene, Elementary Physiology ([Brisbane] Daily Telegraph Office, according to general requirements of the Syllabus of Instruction, 1921).
49. Alfred George Edquist, Nature Studies in Australasia (Melbourne/Sydney, 1916), p. xix.
50. The feminization of schools was an international phenomenon;
51. see James C. Albisetti, 'The Feminization of Teaching in the Nineteenth Century: A Comparative Perspective', History of Education, 22 (1993), 253-263.
52. Official Report of the Nature-Study Exhibition and Conferences, Held in the Royal Botanic Society's Gardens (London, 1903);
53. E.W. Jenkins, 'Science, Sentiment, or Social Control? The Nature Study Movement in England and Wales, 1899-1914', History of Education, 10 (1980), 33-43;
54. E.W. Jenkins and B.J. Swinnerton, 'The School Nature Study Union, 1903-1994', History of Education, 25 (1996), 181-198;
55. and Education Gazette and Teachers' Aid [Melbourne], 20 December 1904, pp. 87-90.
56. Edquist, op. cit. (n. 35), p. xxiii. This volume contained notes of lessons along with earlier articles and lectures of the Supervisor in Nature and Science in the Primary Schools, Education Department in South Australia.
57. For a persuasive discussion of the strong influence of educational ideas from North America on Australia at the turn of the century, see Lesley Dunt, Speaking Worlds: The Australian Educators and John Dewey, 1890-1940 (Melbourne, 1993).
58. Several years later, Frank Tate would observe that the rural schools in Victoria were 'better than most' around the world. An egalitarian in educational outlook, he admonished, 'Wherever education is decentralized and paid for out of moneys raised locally, the rich and progressive districts are, as a rule, magnificently provided for, while poor and underdeveloped districts are starved. In the United States and Canada, within a few miles of a town that had moved me to envy by its beautifully built schools of all grades, elementary schools, high schools, technical high schools, and University college, I often came upon a settlement of farmers where the unsatisfactory makeshift arrangement for the essentials for education for the children of farmers, moved me to corresponding pity and indignation.' Preliminary Report of the Director of Education upon Observations Made during an Official Visit to Europe and America (Melbourne, 1908).
59. Ferdinand von Mueller, Introduction to Botanic Teachings at the Schools of Victoria through References to Leading Native Plants (Melbourne, 1877). For an account of the problems accompanying that publication and Mueller's creative way of dealing with directives, see A.M. Lucas, Sara Maroske and Andrew Brown-May, 'Gardens, Reference Specimens, Texts, and Simplified Organography: F.J.H. Mueller and Botanical Education in Victorian Victoria' (in press and kindly shared by the authors). Important for understanding Mueller will be Life and Letters of Ferdinand von Mueller, ed. R.W. Home et al. (Bern, forthcoming).
60. C.A. Long, Inspector of Schools, Report of the Proceedings of the Federal Educational Congress, Melbourne, 21-23 October 1901 (Melbourne, 1901), p. 69 and 'Nature Study' in Official Report of the Federal Conference on Education, convened by the League of Empire, 24 May to 1 June 1907 (London, 1908), p. 298. For a discussion of competing theories about learning and curriculum in the early twentieth century, see Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958 (New York, 1987).
61. Ballarat, n.d. [1905].
62. William Gillies, First Studies in Plant Life in Australasia, with Numerous Questions, Directions for Outdoor Work, and Drawing and Composition Exercises (Melbourne, [1903], p. iv. Gillies also published, with Robert Hall, Nature Studies in Australia with a Natural History Calendar, Summaries of the Chapters, and Complete Index (Melbourne, [1903]);
63. this volume was reviewed in The Victorian Naturalist, 19 (1903), 155. I thank Linden Gilbank for this reference and a copy of the volume. The preface to Nature Studies points out that the 'new world-wide movement toward Nature Study owes much to the Cornell University, New York State' and that Gillies' volume is intended to help readers follow through on that programme's conception of Nature Study. The introduction by Frank Tate deliberately reflects the ideas found in Clifton Hodge's American text, Nature Study and Life (Boston, 1902).
64. A bound set of many of the issues of The School Paper, organized by paired grades (one and two, three and four, and so forth) is in the State Library of Victoria.
65. The mandated elements are outlined in The Course of Study for Primary Schools: Nature Study (Melbourne, 1906).
66. See Education Gazette and Teachers Aid, vol. 5, no. 7 (1904);
67. vol. 5, no. 12 (1908);
68. vol. 6 Supplement (n.d.);
69. vol. 10, no. 16 (1911).
70. 'Geelong Nature Study Exhibition', Geelong Naturalist, 2(1) (1906) was entirely devoted to the exhibition and lectures.
71. On the career of Tate and on his relationship to Leach, see R.J.W. Selleck, Frank Tate: A
72. Biography (Melbourne, 1982), esp. pp. 156, 166-168, and 201.
73. Leach remained an active advocate and his textbook was revised and reissued during the period of Nature Study revival in the 1950s: Australian Nature Studies: A Book of References for Those Interested in Nature-Study ([Melbourne, 1922] 3rd ed., by E. Byrne, Melbourne, 1952). In introducing his brief eight-year curricular overview (pp. 497-504), Leach specifies topics for study but points to the idea of Liberty Hyde Bailey regarding the necessity of seeing nature as a whole, not simply as parts.
74. Tate paid particular attention to science studies while on a tour abroad, reported in Preliminary Report of the Director of Education upon Observations Made During An Official Visit to Europe and America; with Recommendations Referring to State Education in Victoria (Melbourne, 1908).
75. The Field Naturalists' Club of Victoria made provision for new membership categories to encourage younger members: Associate (under 20 and over 16 years) and juniors (under 16 years). I thank Elizabeth Lawson for providing me with a small but helpful conference volume that describes writers and writing on the plants and animals of Australia: The Literature of Australian Natural History (Canberra, 1995).
76. This brief retrospective account does not specify when the educational programme was in effect, but see the claim in 'Botanical Gardens of the World: Materials for a History', Brooklyn Botanical Garden Record, 23(3) (July 1938), 156.
77. Record and Review of the State Schools Exhibition held in the Exhibition Building, Melbourne, September 5-22, 1906 (Melbourne, 1908).
78. Frank Tate, 'Ideals in Modern Education', State Schools Exhibition, Melbourne, Souvenir Book: The Aims and Work of the Education Department (Melbourne, 1906), p. 13.
79. Melbourne, 1913.
80. Frank Tate, 'Why Nature-Study Should have a Place in a Primary School', The Geelong Naturalist, 2 (Sept. 1905), p. 115.
81. Farley Kelly, 'Learning and Teaching Science: Women Making Careers, 1890-1920', in On the Edge of Discovery: Australian Women in Science (Melbourne, 1993), pp. 52-54.
82. Priscilla Kennedy, Portrait of Winifred West (Gordon, New South Wales, 1976), p. 48.
83. 'Dad's Row', Education Gazette and Teachers' Aid, (November 1906), pp. 79-80. The Field Naturalists' Club of Victoria arranged for fifty teachers to join their annual camp-out at Mornington from 14 December to 2 January, with a full programme of lectures and practical demonstrations. The speaker credited the movement to Louis Agassiz and his summer school on Penikese Island in 1873.
84. John A. McKenzie, 'James Albert Miles: Pioneer of Rural Education', in Laadan Fletcher, ed., Pioneers of Education in Western Australia (Nedlands, Western Australia, 1982), p. 325.
85. John L. Ewing, Development of the New Zealand Primary School Curriculum, 1877-1970 (Wellington, 1970), pp. 90-91.
86. Herbert O. Roth, George Hogben, A Biography (Wellington, 1952). Hogben went on a tour of European and American schools and was very impressed with the educational innovations in Chicago and New York City where Nature Study was a part of the curriculum;
87. see his Schools and Other Educational Institutions in Europe and America, Special Report #7 (Wellington, [1908]), pp. 4, 75-90.
88. Journal of the House of Representatives, Appendix, vol. 2 (1904), pp. xiv-xv;
89. the syllabus was published in October 1903 and gazetted in April 1904. I thank David McConnell of the University of Otago libraries for help in finding this and other sources.
90. Teachers typically spent two years in literary and scientific studies at University Colleges supplemented by winter and summer instruction in methods in programmes in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin.
91. In Dunedin, an avid local naturalist produced A New Zealand Naturalist's Calendar and Notes by the Wayside (Dunedin, 1909) to highlight important features month by month;
92. see also E. Yvonne Speirs, 'George Malcolm Thomson' (Dissertation for Postgraduate Diploma, University of Otago, 1983). The Religious Tract Society produced a descriptive volume that advocated Nature Study without much attention to pedagogy, by Richard Kerr, Nature's Curiosity Shop;
93. or, Recreations in Nature-Study (Dunedin, c. 1907; 177 pages). Local newspapers carried columns and local field naturalists' clubs often co-operated with teachers in identifying appropriate sites for school rambles;
94. see John K. Hartley, Press Cuttings Book for 1913 from The Evening Star, Dunedin. 67. The New Zealand Nature-Study Book (Christchurch, [1905]), p. vii. On nearly contemporary assessments see George M. Thompson, The Naturalization of Animals and Plants in New Zealand (Cambridge, 1922) and Andrew Hill Clark, The Invasion of New Zealand by People, Plants and Animals in the South Island (New Brunswick, NJ, 1949).
95. Edith Howes, Where Bell-Birds Chime (Christchurch, [1912]).
96. This journal came from the teachers' organization, the New Zealand Educational Institute. For examples of the 'Nature Study' column see vol. 7 (1906), 67:15-17 and 68:35.
97. F.A. Johnson, 'Nature Study Exhibition and Conference held in London in 1902', New Zealand Journal of Education, 5 (1904), 35-36.
98. Displacement of Nature Study by elementary science is discussed in Underhill, The Origin and Development of Elementary-Science Education (op. cit., n. 26).
99. In New Zealand, the New Zealand School Publications Branch issued a Revised Syllabus in Nature Study (1948) and the Christchurch Teachers' Training College began to publish Nature Study Bulletin in 1951. These were supplemented by a series of fifteen-minute radio shows broadcast during school hours as reported in Broadcasts to Schools (National Broadcast Service, 1947). During the 1950s a number of other publications suggest an effort to update the curriculum including David Beggs, Nature Study: A Handbook for Teachers (Wellington, 1957);
100. David Beggs and Brian O'Rourke, eds, Places to Explore: A Series of Area Studies for the Nature Study Bulletin of the Christchurch Teachers College and School Science Advisers (Christchurch, 1966);
101. R.R.V. Blanc, Nature Study: A Handbook for Pacific Island Teachers (Wellington, 1958);
102. and New Zealand Department of Education, Understanding the World: Nature Study (Wellington, 1954).
103. Rosemary Polya, Australian School Science Textbooks, 1850-1939: A Bibliography (Bundoora, Victoria, 1986) offers a thoughtful commentary on the authors, textbooks and readers of the nearly two hundred textbooks published for Australian students. On Nature Study, see pp. 19-23 and 29-34;
104. on patriotism, see pp. 6-7.
105. Frank Tate, 'Why Nature-Study Should have a Place in a Primary School', The Geelong Naturalist, 2 (Sept. 1905), 111.