Preliminary Programme

Starting in the 19th century, visual teaching technologies were disseminated to elementary schools on an industrial scale across the world. Although the use of pedagogical tools other than texts was by no means a new phenomenon, the classroom use of images grew substantially from the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries. In churches, religious motifs had been available for the people since the Middle ages. Book illustrations came to be included in the Bible and oil paintings of biblical stories were spread among the bourgeois but were only available for the few. The first examples of pedagogic images in Sweden appeared in the mid-nineteenth century and were used for teaching Biblical history, and thus constituted an early stage in their dissemination to a wider audience. The purposes of using wall charts and religious images stood in continuity with the church teaching as they were to clarify Biblical texts, visualise Biblical stories and inspire meditation and prayer. Biblical wall charts, due to their universal content, were part of an early international market in school materials, and were exported between European countries. Initially, wall charts were relatively cheap foreign products that were adapted to national use, but they were eventually produced domestically. A precondition for this was substantial investment in the graphic design and national adaptation of the charts. Demands in line with the Swedish pedagogue Alfred Dalin’s call to “speak the homeland’s language” meant that even religious illustrations needed to enhance the national character. This paper is especially interested in the development of the biblical wall charts in Sweden in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century. Bible wall charts depicted foreign countries, culture and peoples and are therefore particularly interesting to study in relation to the national movements during this period. Why was for example Jesus illustrated as a white Western male in the Swedish wall charts of the early twentieth century? Apart from the objective of studying the evolution of the content of graphical motifs, I will discuss the role of the publishing houses and school supply industry as well as the production process. This paper is inspired by recent perspectives in joining the visual and material in the study of educational history. More specifically, in the context of material culture and the dissemination of wall charts in schools, this research takes account of educational industry and transnational commerce in school objects when examining the economic dimensions of mass schooling. Earlier research has only discussed the role of biblical wall charts in the teaching at a general level, and we lack deeper empirical analyses of how wall charts in practice were funded, produced, sold, and made available to schools. (Show less)

In this paper I aim to present perspectives upon continuities between Church and School. From a theological point of view, I will argue for the fruitfulness of analyzing the Classroom as a form of sacred Space in analogy with the Church as a room for worship, and for analyzing the Teachers as performing holy practices in line with a priest or a pastor.

Sacred space
The Schoolhouse, the Church building and the Prayer house were all crucial buildings in the Nordic society during late 19th and early 20th centuries. The school hall with its spatial conditions and furnishings inhabited many similarities with both the Church of the Parish and the Prayer houses. The rows of benches were in both church and school placed in straight rows and those sitting by these benches turned their attention to the pulpit in church or the so-called cathedra (kateder) in school. In several places, the rows of benches were divided by gender, with boys on one side of the aisle and girls on the other, reminiscent of a Post-Reformation church room. Furthermore, both the Church room and Prayer house, as well as the School hall, housed an organ.

Sacred practices
The practices that were expressed in the different environments mentioned above also had similarities. In all three, the Word was at the center through reading Bible texts and through preaching or teaching. Hymn singing was also a central practice in all these different contexts and environments.
In these environments and at the center of the practitioners, there were actors in the form of Priests, Cantors, Preachers and Teachers as well as the congregation and the students with the roles of giving and receiving teaching in various forms.
The purpose of this paper is to track and compare how different practices, spatial expressions and role of actors were moved from one environment to another. How were ecclesiastical (and non-ecclesiastical) practices expressed in school? Which practices, spatial expressions and actors were inherited from one context to another and which were transformed and acquired (partly) and given new expressions or meanings?
The historical continuities between Church and School in the Nordic realm are still waiting to be investigated in a more systematic way. This paper aims at pointing at some possible roads ahead for further research. (Show less)

In this presentation, we propose that the Danish-Norwegian national narrative as presented in the school's curriculum and in theology from the Age of the Enlightenment on, is a transformation of the salvation story formerly conducted by the church. We will study how the transformation took place from the reformation (16th century) up to 19th century. Our focus point is upon how the role of the Jews are presented in the material and its function in the narrative. Our thesis is that the function of the (literary) Jews changed from being central in the Christian upbringing of the people in the early modern period, to become more problematic in the enlightened civil society. This change can be seen in school’s textbooks and in public writings from the late 18th and early 19th century. Based on a chronological study of such textbooks and school materials, as Jacob Jacobssøn Wolffs Jewish Chronicle from 1634 and late 18th century writings like Børnevennen, Birch’s biblical history in addition to public writings like Minerva, we will shed light upon how this transformation of the original narrative took place, and how motives from a previous salvation story now can be found in new narratives, aiming to strengthen national identity. One of our central questions regards the category of “time”. How is the presentation of the Jews characterised by different understandings of the fulfilment of the Jewish prophets? Another question regards the category of “place”. What is the place of the Jews, and how are their different roles fullfilled in the society? (Show less)