Glass lantern slides and visual instruction for school teachers in early twentieth-century Argentina

HOLLMAN, VERÓNICA

Early Popular Visual Culture

Routledge

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2016 vol. 14 p. 1 - 15

The first institution to promote teacher training for the elementaryeducation system in Argentina ? Escuela Normal de Paraná ? wascreated in 1871. Among many teaching aids, this institution had animportant collection of lantern slides. The purpose of this paper isto analyze the place of images and visual instruction in the trainingof teachers in Argentina in the early twentieth century. The paperexplores the geographical sub-collection of an archive of 4700 glasslantern slides by focusing on its topics, visual content and structure.The archival organization is analyzed to understand its use as amodernizing pedagogy in an institution that privileged expertisein teaching methods. It is argued that the pedagogic use of lanternslides raised two areas of tension. On the one hand, as a visualtechnology associated with entertainment, lantern slides had to berecontextualized as a pedagogic aid. On the other hand, the lack ofawareness of Argentinean landscapes in foreign slide collectionsbecame a problematic issue particularly in the teaching of geography.In order to be conceived as an appropriate form of visual imagerydisplayed in schools, glass lantern slides were reframed as part of ascientific method of instruction and a national corpus of knowledge.