More to wall charts than meets the eye
How to choose visual methods for exploring the visual surrounding of pupils.
paper presented by karl catteeuw () at the ECER-meeting, network 17, in Hamburg, 18 Sept. 2003-09-23
I once compared doing history to having a rear view mirror while driving a car. The metaphor was supposed to demonstrate to undergraduates in educational studies how history contextualizes our everyday educational theorizing and practices, without having to be practical in a direct sense. It's a lousy metaphor. Nevertheless, historians of education - and undergraduates - should inscribe their rear view mirrors with: 'objects may appear easier than they are'.
There is a lot of work done in history of education that takes this warning in account, and a whole lot more that simply doesn't. Worth a special mention is the work done at the ische xx conference in 1998 and in the network-17 at the ECER meetings since 1999[1] - which explains why I present this paper here. But in spite of such a 'pictorial turn' in history proclaimed by W.J.T. Mitchell, a lot of pictures in history-of-education are mere illustrations to textual research - and some are even badly chosen ones. It is not hard to find photographs in historical studies with only a very futile part of their content explained. It is also possible to find downright wrong explanations of pictures[2]. But the most frustration enters when research based on educational images themselves, fails to connect to the warning I stated above. This paper tries to find a way to do history of education based on wall charts that does connect to the insights and hindsights of those so-called 'visual studies'.
The book I used as my main source on visual studies is Gillian Rose's Visual Methodologies[3], which is rather a sort of a textbook - so readers like Mirzoeff's and Stuart Hall's are good and necessary complements[4]. The advantage of Rose's rather complicated textbook, is that she offers a very renewing framework for arranging the different kinds of research done in the very broad field of visual studies. She distinguishes nine kinds of meaning in visual sources, which then can be retrieved through existing visual methods she wrote across her scheme - methods she then further describes in her textbook: psycho-analysis, content analysis, compositional analysis, audience studies etc. Her approach is attractive because it gives a very good insight in the different interests and points of view of the array in visual methods, it sums up all the meanings one can find in visual sources, and it directly links the latter to the former. The drawback of her framework for visual studies in our case is that it does not take a historical or educational context in account, that not all meaning is linked to methods and that her subdivision of methods is rather crude[5].
Therefore I derived a small scheme based on the one originally devised by Rose, which will be useful for research on wall charts. Wall charts are the large graphics made for use in classrooms, which exist since the 1840s. My own research is focussed on Belgian primary education, and wall charts for language and observational skills, but the subject is international enough to be of interest to others as well; wall charts were made in every modern nation with an educational system, for every kind of subject at almost any level. My reason for studying wall charts is the material culture that was shaped and passed on by them - it's not about antiques or aesthetics.
The grid consists of two axis: one for the point in the communication process, one for the level at which the image produce meaning. In short, it shows all the kinds of meaning contained in an image, links them to questions that can be asked, and then on to methods for answering them. A third axis can be added by using historical sources in answering the questions. Already without any further explanation, it shows how almost all research done on wall charts focuses on the middle cell: what can be seen in the image itself[6]? The same goes for historical exhibitions of wall chart collections - they usually are as stereotypical as the research behind them[7]. As useful as the grid is, it does not provide a straight-forward access to the multiple meanings wall charts have had.
producer / Message / audiencetechnology / How was it made? / What were the visual effects? / How was it disseminated and displayed?
composition / What were the conventions of the genre? / What are the elements and the structure of the composition? / Which points of view were possible? What was the relation to other texts and images?
social use / Who made it where, when, for whom and why? / What meanings were attributed to it? / Who saw them, how did they interpret them and why?
The horizontal axis show different points in the communication, and therefore points at different kinds of source material left behind at those points. The producers of wall charts left behind some legislation and administration, some biographical art history, very little correspondence and company archives, and a whole lot of advertisements and manuals. The wall charts themselves were partly preserved in museums - old school museums which used to be loan services and demonstrations of 'modern' school equipment, as well as new school museums which show the old stuff. There are some very good collections in Europe, notably in Copenhagen, Duisburg, Rotterdam and Ghent, and there is a serious effort to share an inventory of those and other collections[8]. Moreover, the inventory matches these collections to the original catalogues and advertisements of the publishing companies. As for the audience side of the coin, two kinds of sources offer an indirect entrance on what interpretations pupils made: reminiscences and intertextuality. The first one can be done by retrieving published memories or by interviewing people, but the selections are very limited, memories have often faded, adults tend to use a lot of hindsight in their recollections to claim they 'saw through' wall charts. And of course there are a lot of contradictions; people interviewed in 1999 about the classroom they shared in the 1950s argue about the simple fact whether there were or weren't any wall charts. As for the intertextuality, it would be interesting to compare the ways in which subjects were visualised inside and outsides schools, as well as the ways in which the educational visualisation itself was visualised outside schools. The former is worth a study in itself, but should be limited to a certain visual theme. Of the latter I've included two examples from comic books[9] - there are a lot of examples to be drawn from modern art as well[10]. Although from the point of view of a cultural history of education, the meaning made at the level of the audience seems to be of most interest, it is too hard to investigate directly. However, the meaning at this site is still guided by the ways in which meaning is produced elsewhere - wall charts weren't Rorschach tests, they were more like rebuses.
As for the vertical axis, there are some serious additions to the scheme as proposed by Rose. On the technological side, a lot has been written about educational technology, as a combination of didactics and comparative media studies. Wall charts have been a static, imperative, relatively permanent, decorative, attractive, communal, idealistic medium, depending on who used them in what context. They also had a very strong link with educational exhibitions and museum classrooms by offering a systematic and exhaustive scheme of ready-made specimens of a perfect reality. They suggested empirical observation and promoted progress as well as nostalgia. The use of series gave way to attempts to accommodate 'all' reality: the four seasons, all crafts and trades, all games children play, a day in the life of the perfect pupil, all sorts of transport over land - one series was even called 'The Full Life'. This brings us to the composition of wall charts: what elements are shown, in what order, in what correlation, in what style? Here the 'traditional' visual methods come to good use, analysing discourse, composition as well as content. Quite stunning is the absence of certain elements: there is no dust or blood or violence or doubt. The visual styles were quite explicit: exemplary figures were put centre-stage and did nothing but good deeds, the few bad examples were loaded with evil, disorder and ugliness - which in itself was shown quite neatly. Most of the existent wall chart research is about this level of analysis. The problem is that it usually is about the singular interpretation of the composition of a thematically related wall charts. All wall charts on one subject are detected, they are laid out in a chronological order, then reproduced and described in detail. When the 'expert eye'[11] touches them, their true (supposedly 'hidden') meaning is revealed, which leads to a conclusion about the political incorrectness of the wall charts: they were racist, sexist, colonialist, capitalist or fascist propaganda. There are several problems with this method: only one true meaning is found, instead of a multiple layers and levels of meaning, the 'expert eye' can be a valid method but certainly isn't the only one, the importance given to the selected wall charts lies in the eye of the beholder, and nothing is said about the educational or historical context.
This bring me to the bottom row, the social use of the images. This is what sets wall charts apart from other visual material - even from classroom photographs, about which Ian Grosvenor wrote a methodological warning[12]. The designers, the teachers and the pupils all knew this was material meant to be consumed in classrooms, according to scholarly customs. Wall charts were essentially machines to be used by teachers. On the top level, they were promoted through pedagogical articles in magazines, advertisements, legislation, inspection. This deserves a history in its own right: possession became recommended, then even compulsory; identical arguments were made by late 19th century schools and by progressive educators for critizing the same schools. It is rather hard to know how teachers really used wall charts, but there are definitive signs left behind. Model lessons hardly used wall charts, unless wall charts are the actual point of the model. As Larry Cuban demonstrated for school radio, film and television, most teachers were only mildly interested in educational technology, as long as it didn't distract them from resolving classroom paradoxes[13]. Wall charts were a much less intrusive medium, which explains why it was in vogue from the 1860s to the 1950s and why it was spread in such large numbers: it was very easy to adopt and then ignore. This doesn't mean pupils didn't 'use' them. The wall charts that hung in backs of their classrooms and even in the corridors were seen, and as said above, such was done in a very specific context. Therefore it's not that hard to guess what meanings pupils could attach to such pictures. Although David Freedberg did so for paintings[14], I will not risk this for wall charts - but it's not impossible.
As a conclusion, my renewed grid is quite different from Rose's. My chapters, sources and methods fit in nicely into different cells, rows or columns. Moreover, I think more historical studies of classroom material can benefit from it; it's a framework for all explorations of visual containments of children in classrooms.
Short note
I realize it is 'just' a grid, which isn't put to use yet with substantial research. Part of the research is already done, and the whole work should be finished by the summer of 2004, when it will be defended as a doctoral dissertation in Dutch at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Comments on the text are welcome at .
Some images
'The sleeve design of 'The Bobo Statue' by Marc Sleen, a comic album in his Nero-series, probably was the first depiction of a naked man I ever saw. The comic itself was a bit of a come-down, I thought.' Paul Mennes 'Oedipus in Zonnedorp' in Rik Pareit (Ed.) Geheimzinnige sterren. Over het Belgische stripverhaal (Antwerpen: Dedalus, 1996), p. 13
"The two-part offset lithograph "Les animaux de la ferme" (1974) depicts on both sheets, in true didactic fashion, different European breeds of domestic cattle. Here, too, artistic qualities are not readily discernible. In fact, both prints would seem more at home in a veterinary or agricultural training college than in the art exhibition into which they appear to have found their way by mistake. Or so it would seem until we take a closer look at the captions: instead of the names of different cattle breeds we are surprised to find the names of well-known car makes. Here, too, the viewer can find his way towards an understanding of Broodthaers' works only through a process of greater scrunity followed by an experience of irritation which, as here, is often wrapped in irony.
Perhaps this is precisely Marcel Broodthaers' strategy: he first of all confronts us with things which we are familiar with and then suggests that there is more behind them than actually meets the eye. Here the stumbling blocks along the road to cognition are so small that they are not immediately recognizable and can frequently be overlooked - and this is something all of us must have experienced at some or other." Norbert Nobis 'Coming to terms with Marcel Broodthaers' in Katalog der Editionen. Graphik und Bücher (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz, 1996), p. 11
[1] Two quintessential studies in this respect are Depaepe & Henkens (eds.) The Challenge of the Visual in the History of Education [special issue of Paedagogica Historica, XXVI,1 (2000)] and Grosvenor, Lawn & Rousmaniere (eds.) Silences and Images. The Social History of the Classroom' (Peter Lang, 1999)