STS: The Nature Study Movement in Education, 1890-1932

Project Abstract

Sally Kohlstedt, University of Minnesota

The Nature Study Movement in Education, 1890-1932

In the late nineteenth century for the first time educators began to make instruction in the natural sciences an integral part of the public school curriculum down to the most elementary grades. Advocacy for and experiments with science teaching had been tried in private schools and even a few public ones, but only at the turn of the century was there a national movement to introduce the natural sciences into urban and rural publicly funded school classrooms. The most visible and widely advocated pedagogical technique was 'nature study' and its proponents offered multiple justifications for introducing children to plants, insects, birds, meteorological observation, and other phenomena. This historical project provides the first extensive discussion of the nature study movement from its origins in the early 1890s through the 1920s when educational leaders called for a radically distinct pedagogical approach.

The often profoundly different geographic, social, and economic circumstances of children in urban centers, in suburban locations, in small towns, and in the rural countryside serviced by one and two room schools also meant programs differed in rationale, in quality of teacher preparation, in availability of resources for teaching, and in the interests of the children. Nonetheless, there were elements that made nature study a movement, including several prominent textbooks used for teacher training and for classrooms, a specialized educational journal, Nature-Study Review, and a membership organization of administrators and teachers in the movement. Increasing standardization in normal school training and in bureaucratic urban and even state-wide school systems made implementation possible, but it was broader commitment by local communities as well as school administrators and teachers that established nature study across the American landscape, although apparently not much in the poorer schools of the South. Nature study education framed a set of principles for learning first hand about the natural world that was extended into informal settings like the Boy and Girl Scouts, the new environmental nature centers ringing urban areas, and junior clubs within the Audubon and Wild Flower societies.

This project allows the investigator to spend a month doing the final research that extends the discussion of the movement to geographical locations that have not been fully investigated. It also supports the efforts of a graduate student to survey the nature study literature generated during this forty-year period, including materials from Germany. Historians of science have long noted the nature study movement, often mentioning it in passing and presuming that it was ephemeral or not highly relevant. The publications from this research establish its pervasiveness over several decades and its relationship to the dynamic changes in the natural sciences during this period.