ABSTRACT Scientists played a key role in the first systematic introduction of nature study into North American public schools in the late nineteenth century. The initiatives of Wilbur Jackman and John Merle Coulter, affiliated with the young University of Chicago, and Liberty Hyde Bailey and Anna Botsford Comstock, at Cornell University, coincided with the “new education” reform movement that found object lessons and experience‐based education superior to textbook teaching. Educational psychologists and philosophers of the 1890s, including G. Stanley Hall, related (...) curriculum methods to perceived developmental stages in children, with a focus on immediate experience. Putting these pedagogical ideas—gained in summer institutes, normal schools, and programs at Chicago and Cornell—into practice were administrators and classroom teachers in both urban and rural classrooms. By 1900, a consensus about the value of nature study among scientists, community leaders, and teachers established it as the recognized general method of studying the natural world in public schools across much of the United States. (shrink)

Mentorship and collaboration necessarily shaped opportunities for women in science, especially in the late nineteenth century at rapidly expanding public co-educational universities. A few male faculty made space for women to establish their own research programs and professional identities. At the University of Minnesota, botanist Conway MacMillan, an ambitious young department chair, provided a qualified mentorship to Josephine Tilden. He encouraged her research on algae and relied on her to do departmental support tasks even as he persuaded the administration to (...) move her from instructor to assistant professor in 1903. Resulting publications on Minnesota algae led her to look further west, first at Yellowstone National Park and then along the Pacific Northwest coast. After visiting a particularly productive littoral site on Vancouver Island, she suggested that they establish a Minnesota Seaside Station there. Over its seven years in operation under the Midwestern leaders, that location proved remarkably productive. At the remote site, the two operated within their typical but not inevitable gendered roles and deliberately defined their seaside station as unconventional. They expected participants to study productively and, at the same time, find imaginative ways to enjoy nature at a place far from urban amenities. Gendered expectations remained casual as participants moved both within and against them. This study investigates how, in the early twentieth century, the role and expectations of mentorship shifted as Tilden established her own independent research agenda. The Minnesota Seaside Station, in particular, proved significant in developing the leadership skills essential for her to pursue research in the Pacific region at a time when American expansionism and indigenous cooperation made sites accessible to academic researchers. (shrink)

Late nineteenth‐century public museums in the United States were intentionally built to be modern, guided by administrators like George Brown Goode toward scientific goals that included preservation, research, and education. Self‐consciously preoccupied with the management of museums, intent on attaining mastery over the objects that constituted their museums, and persuaded that meaning derived not just from the objects themselves but from their explanation and configuration by experts, museum masters led a “new museum” movement. A century later, the critiques of postmodern (...) scholars attest to the museum directors’ effective establishment of a modern profile. Historians of science, who once could take these institutions for granted as a lightly marked center of authority, now may use methods of social and cultural studies to open their institutional and intellectual frames. While cautious about theory‐driven arguments, such scholars benefit from the issues raised by cultural critics even as they rely on their own documentary methods to ensure that science is an integral component when examining ideas, language, and practice in context. (shrink)

Women educators played an essential role in transforming public museums that had been focused on collections and research into effective educational and informational sites that engaged broad publics. Three significant innovators were Delia Griffin of St. Johnsbury Museum in Vermont who emphasized hands-on learning, Anna Billings Gallup who shaped a distinctive model museum for children in Brooklyn and Laura Bragg of the Charleston Museum who established strong collaboration with the local public schools. Joining museum curatorial staffs and professional associations that (...) were largely male, these women educators and their peers typically provided pedagogical insights and teaching skills that enabled them to work effectively with school systems, teachers, pupils and parents. Genuinely interested in natural science, they shaped careers which included opportunities to engage with science, provided a considerable degree of autonomy and enabled them to experiment with hands-on learning. They built networks of museum educators and influenced the young American Association of Museums. Women museum educators created a bridge between semi-public natural history establishments for collection, preservation and scientific research and an active audience of teachers, pupils, visitors and patrons. Their efforts transformed museums into sites for education and broad public access to science in the early 20th century. (shrink)