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Falling Under the Spell: Literacy Artifacts at Jerome Library

You shift in your seat, your legs sticking slightly to the wooden bench seat. Your teacher

makes her way to the back of the room, her skirts swishing with her stride, the heels of her shoes

click-clicking on the floorboards. You turn you head just in time to see her arms flex under her

dress sleeves as she grasps the handle of the oblong, metal projector case. She pulls of the lid

with a soft clatter and hoists the projector to the cabinet top. She turns down the wall lights and

the room quiets except for a few giggling whispers in the front row. With the flick of a switch,

the projector fan begins to whir and you see the outline of a market splash across the front of the

room. As you listen to your teachers voice narrate the scenethe smell of dirt and fresh fruit,

the sounds of bartering shopkeepers and giggling children, the splashes of bright color on the

stalls and clothingyou are transported from your seat in a rural schoolhouse to the marketplace

of the Caribbean.

Lantern projectors, stereoscopes, and glass slides were all vital components in the

movement toward visual instruction, popular from the early 20th century until after the end of

World War II. Students across the United States learned from images on small glass slides and

stiff paper cards as part of an effort to make learning more concrete and object oriented.

Teachers were not only responsible for knowing the content they were teaching students, but

were also suddenly tasked with understanding how to use technologies such as the lantern slide

projector, stereoscope, and moving picture projector to give their students to opportunity to see

sites they might otherwise never know about or only be able to imagine from descriptions

contained in their leather-bound primers.

1. Welcome to the Archives

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Our focus on teacher training and instructional technologies developed after a visit and

exploration of the Little Red Schoolhouse maintained on Bowling Green State Universitys

campus. The schoolhouse, reminiscent of the one described in this papers introduction, is

preserved in a state similar to what it might have looked like in the early twentieth century. The

schoolhouse, with its rows of small, wooden desks and large wood stove is also home to a

multitude of artifacts and memorabilia related to educational history. Since these artifacts are

displayed functionally, including the American flag hung at the front of the room and the wall

charts plastered on the walls, visiting the schoolhouse brings out a childlike roleplay and natural

curiosity in its visitors. We were not exempt from falling under its spell; we could not help but

explore.

While pulling open drawers and cabinets doors in the schoolhouse, we discovered a

Keystone View Company slide cabinet which housed what appeared to be an almost complete

600 set from the companys inventory although we had no clue what a 600 set was at the

time, nor did we realize the winding journey we were embarking on. As we pulled out drawer

after drawer from the cabinet and held up different slides to the light we were amazed at the

degree of detail of the images as well as the small, square paper instructional cards that were

paired with them in their individual drawer dividers. We shared many a knowing look, our minds

spinning at the possibilities and acknowledgement of how much we did not know. We were

immediately transfixed and needed to investigate these pieces of classroom technology further.

After our transformative trip to the schoolhouse, we determined we needed to focus on

the ways technology was used in little red schoolhouses across the United States in the late

nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. We were interested in the different forms of visual

technology including lantern slide projectors, glass slides, stereoscope viewers, and stereoscope
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cards. To offer context for these artifacts, we realized we needed to do more research on the

items themselves, the companies that produced them, the instructional methods used at the time,

and the implications of those methods on students learning.

Our next task was to determine whether the slides could be digitized and contextualized

for exhibition in the Jerome Librarys online archive. We were briefly sidetracked when we

realized the slide set in the Little Red Schoolhouse was curated by the Education department and

therefore owned by their archive rather than the archive housed in the Jerome Library. To

maintain the focus of our research as well as commit our service to the Jerome Library, we

redirected our efforts to the smaller, but still representative slide collection in the library

archives. Our close investigation of these slides as well as the lantern slide projector,

stereoscope, stereoscopic cards, and literature cards, would not have been successful without the

help of the archives staff, and, in particular, Nick Pavlik. The archives staff were instrumental in

helping us to find related materials and stimulating our research in productive ways. We would

never have known about these additional artifacts if we had still been focused solely on the 600

set in the Little Red Schoolhouse. From the beginning our research process was necessarily

complicated and diverged into overwhelming possibilities.

This new direction included, in part, investigating the history of the companies who

developed the glass slides and stereoscope cards like those in the Little Red Schoolhouse and

archives, namely the Keystone View Company of Meadville, Pennsylvania. The archives, though

rich in primary sources like the literature cards and slides, had little available contextual

information about their production or the reason for their production and use as an educational

technology. Additionally, we knew very little about the ways these tools were used, especially by
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schoolteachers in one room schoolhouses or in training at normal colleges like Bowling Green

State University.

2. Collaborative Workload: My Individual Contributions to the Project

Realizing that there was a great deal we did not yet know, we each individually

researched aspects of the project. My first task was to find secondary sources from the fields of

composition studies and education that investigated or discussed lantern slide projector and

stereoscope viewer technologies. I was also interested in the teaching practices associated with

these technologies. My focus areas were to include the technologies themselves, and their

relationship with education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As I began to research

these issues, my investigation naturally widened and several trajectories emerged including the

development of these technologies, their adaptations for educational audiences, Keystone View

Company and their contemporaries, the visual instruction movement, and the history of

scholarship related to that movement. I began to discover vital information about the visual

instruction movement of the early- to mid-twentieth century. I also found significant accounts of

the biases and ideological implications of the slides, cards, and guide materials distributed by

companies including Keystone View Company and Underwood & Underwood. Additionally, I

saw significant connections between these innovations in the twentieth century and their twenty-

first century counterparts like Google Cardboard and virtual reality (VR).

I quickly realized these various trajectories were much too vast for the purposes of our

project, however, they did lend themselves the possibility of future projects and expansions of

our work. I welcomed these possibilities gladly.

2.1 Visual Instruction

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As my research progressed, I discovered an entire history of visual instruction that I had

been previously oblivious to. This movement in education was motivated by technological

advances much earlier than the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, scientists began to

understand vision as a unique discipline. Of particular interest to those in field were the ways

people perceived objects in relation to themselves. Vision was initially a tool for the rationalist

and positivist movements since vision was, at least at the time, an objective means for observing

and understanding the world. At the same time that scientists began to develop studies of sight

and vision, materials to enhance or alter ways of seeing were being developed for entertainment.

Nineteenth century parlor culture saw the development and popularization of the stereoscope, a

toy for seeing three dimensional images that would eventually be adapted for classroom use in

the twentieth century by teachers interested in the visual instruction movement.

Simultaneously, in states across the country, common schools developed, financed, and

regulated by state and local governments formed. Local schools tasked with educating the

growing population of young people searched for ways to educate and, in many cases civilize,

their students. In 1802, Ohio passed law preventing poor students from receiving inadequate or

unequal education in schools that benefit from state funding (McCormick). As a result, students

of all backgrounds and classes started to receive formal educations in what would come to later

be called one-room or little red schoolhouses like the one now preserved on Bowling Green

State Universitys campus.

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in little red schoolhouses across

the United States, teachers employed the power of the object lesson: a method for teaching

focused on learning through senses with real things in nature. A teacher might take her students

into the schoolyard for a lesson about photosynthesis, or to a farmers field to learn about
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irrigation. The object lesson was inherently limited by the amount of access teachers and

students had to concrete examples. These limitations were exacerbated by the schools location,

the class and race of its students, and the funding available from state and local governments.

With the rise of the visual instruction movement and the development and distribution of

technology like the lantern projector and stereoscope by companies like Underwood &

Underwood and the Keystone View Company, teachers saw these issues seemingly disappear as

students from all positions gained access to popular tourist destinations, famous landmarks,

faraway lands, and distant peoples. The object lesson was eventually superseded by visual

instruction, a technique in education that was widely used until the end of World War II when

audiovisual lessons took over, again because of shifts in the availability of particular

technologies.

2.2 Lantern Projectors and Glass Slides

One of the most popular technologies of the visual instruction movement was the lantern

projector. Just as the movement has its roots in earlier pedagogy, so does the slide projector.

Before the development of the popular twentieth century-style lantern projector came its

lower-tech precursor: the magic lantern. The magic lantern, or Magin Cataoprica, was a machine

lit by a candle and capable of projecting hand painted images of ghosts, devils, demons, and

skeletons onto smoke obscured walls. The magic lantern was developed by German Jesuit

Athanasius Kirscher who published Ars Magna Lucis (1646) in which he described the machine

and the mystical power it had for trickery (Saettler). Later, in Paris in the 18th century, E.G.

Robertson used the magic lantern in his Phantasmagoria theater, where he similarly used the

projections to trick and frighten theater goers (Eisenhauer). This understanding of viewing

technologies as magicians tools or objects of the supernatural persisted until the 19th century
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development of vision as a discipline, after which vision began to be seen as a scientific and

objective pursuit.

Part of the shift toward a more objective or positivist understanding of vision came with

technological developments in photography and the motion picture projector. The magic

lantern became the optical lantern and, in the 19th century, helped scientists and educators

begin to see vision as a method for inquiry. According to Eisenhauer, developments in

photography in the late 19th century dramatically increased [the] availability and consistency

[of images], but photography also released the image from its entanglements with the perceived

imperfection of the rendering hand (201). As images grew more precise, the projector joined the

ranks of the microscope as a tool for scientific discovery and education. However, as Eisenhauer

argues, The magic lantern was not simply used by education, but of equal importance,

discourses of scientific vision used references to education and instruction as a means through

which to promote such projection technologies as optical lanterns rather than magic lanterns.

As a result, an objective rather than supernatural relationship between viewer and object was

defined (202). While later, questions were raised regarding the level of possible objectivity of

the projector, at a time when educators sought a method for applying visual instruction, it was a

respected and, arguably, necessary tool. It was a tool so necessary in fact that in 1886, L.H.

Laudy reported New York State had appropriated $18,000 annually for normal colleges to use on

the purchase of lantern slide technologies (see more in Teacher Training on the development

of visual instruction at normal colleges). As Eisenhauer reports, the lantern projector and

collections of slides opened the possibility for classes to see the unseen and to access

information in large groups as was the case for entire classrooms of viewers (203).
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The Delineascope lantern projector housed in the Jerome Library archives is one model

that teachers would have used to display slide images for their classes. Although the projector is

an incredibly useful tool, it was by no means simple to operate. The Delineascope came with a

dense manual, full of charts and measurements for properly adjusting the lens and bulbs to

project clear images of slides. A teacher could not have just pulled the projector out its metal

case and projected images to her class. Rather, the operation of the machine would have taken

careful study and preparation in her spare time before students arrival or after their dismissal on

an already long, tiring day. She would have spent time leaned over the manual, tinkering with the

bulbs, and measuring the distance from her projector cart to the front wall. She would have

painstakingly arranged slides on her cart in preparation for the days lesson, taking care to keep

them in the right order, to not scratch their delicate glass faces, to point out what students should

look for and look at. Although they were an open door for students to experience otherworldly

scenes, these slide lessons were not easily taught. Still, the length of the visual instruction

movement implies teachers recognized the importance of these new technologies and took their

time to learn and employ them in the classroom.

The importance of these new projection technologies was similarly demonstrated in a

report by the Visual Education Association of California in 1915. In the report, the organization

declares, With a combination of stereopticon slides and photographs for opaque projection

(material already put at the disposal of its schools by New York State) and the motion picture for

living scenes 'the only true Esperanto that all of every class and tongue can understand,' the

efficiency of our schools should increase many fold. (Our Visual Education Problem 2) The

report notes that, although typically only big city schools could afford to use slides, now rural

schools can use them not only for class work but as the basis for rural social center work (3).
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However, also not lost on the Visual Education Association was the need to adequately finance

schools to acquire all the technologies needed. Slides, ranging in price from $0.50 to $1.00, were

difficult to purchase for individual schools. For access to be equal, the VEA reported,

practically all well-equipped schools, even the smaller ones, have stereopticons, projectors of

opaque objects such as photographs, or motion picture machines" (2). The departments library

totaled 220,000 slides to be shared among all schools in their jurisdiction. This process of

sharing slides among schools was widely used to combat the high cost of ownership and avoid

unnecessary duplications of materials. In some education departments, like in Chicago, slides

were distributed among several schools through either the circuit method, wherein schools

rotated the use of slides and supplementary materials at predetermined times, or the special-order

method, which allowed teachers to reserve slides for a specific day and lesson.

Libraries of slides grew to extraordinary levels during the 1920s and 1930s when visual

instruction was on the rise in the U. S. In 1923, F. Dean McCluskyfuture president of what

would eventually be known as the Association for Educational Communication & Technology

and leading researcher of visual instructionfound approximately 686 projectors were in use in

16 U.S. cities. Most of these projectors were portable or semi-portable and were supplied by 14

city department slide libraries of 236,884 slides. Per McCluskys survey for the National

Education Association (NEA), slides were the most widely used visual media that year, followed

by the moving picture projector.

2.3 Stereoscopes and Stereographs

While lantern slide projectors allowed teachers to lecture entire schoolhouses of children

at one time, stereoscope viewers were an inexpensive alternative technology. As Bak explains,

just as the object lesson offered students the chance to learn through their senses, the visual and
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tactile attributes of optical devices like the stereoscope echoe[d] the logic of the object lesson

(147). Although David Brewster is often credited with its invention, Sir Charles Wheatstone

invented the first stereoscope model in 1837. The model had a box-like structure and two mirrors

set at 45 degree angles in relation to the viewers eyes. The device was originally used with hand

drawn images since its invention predated the development of photography by a year.

Brewsters model, developed over the course of several years, premiered at the Great

Exhibition in 1851 and was viewed by Queen Victoria. This model, which more closely

resembled a pair of opera glasses, was more portable than the Wheatstone model and relied on

the use of lenses to create the 3-D image seen by its users. Brewsters stereoscopes quickly

became a central part of the parlor culture of the wealthy and middle class. Not only were

Brewster models examples of fine craftsmanship with their ornamental engravings and patterns

and leather or cloth covered bodies, they were also a tool for transporting viewers to foreign

landscapes and what we might now consider othered localeslocations that were seen, and

eventually described in the cards supplementary materials as savage, impoverished, and bleak.

As the market grew, standardized cards (3 x 7) were produced featuring photographs of

tourist locations and third world countries which could simultaneously elevate viewers and

separate them from their immigrant roots. The cards viewers could separate themselves from the

subjects depicted in these images and feel a sense of superiority over them. By 1861, Oliver

Wendell Holmes had adapted the stereoscope into the less expensive and more accessible model

like the artifact depicted on this page. Although briefly ubiquitous, the stereoscope would

quickly fall out of high culture. This may be due in part to Holmes model leveling access for

lower class users.

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While the stereoscope would fall out of popularity with middle class bourgeois, it would

soon be recognized as an economical tool for the classroom by proponents of the visual

instruction movement and companies like Underwood & Underwood and Keystone. Underwood

& Underwood and Keystone linked the stereoscope to education and notions of national

citizenship, suggesting that it could help teach subjects such as geography as well as aid in the

appreciation and spread of American civilization (404). Underwood & Underwood published

Albert Osbornes The Stereograph and the Stereoscope (1909) to link the technology with

trending views of enlightenment and scientific pursuits. Both companies developed practices

including publishing guides that made a clear connection from their materials to intellectual,

cultural, and moral development (404). These connections were reinforced by the

supplementary books and lecture notes marketed to teachers to guide their instruction.

Stereoscopic technology was also marketed as having the ability to elevate lower classes,

giving them the opportunity to connect with other Americans, form patriotic identity, and travel,

albeit virtually, to foreign lands. For schoolchildren, especially those in rural locations, this

virtual travel was a transformative part of their education. Students in rural Ohio were

transported to a classroom in Peking or to a Navaho [sic] reservation in the Southwest. These

experiences reflected unequalled visual access available through new viewing technologies

(Schiavo).

The stereoscope, though it could only be used by one student at a time, was much more

economical and more widely used during the twentieth century. McClusky (1923) reported in the

schools he surveyed there were 1,642 stereopticons in use; approximately two-and-a-half times

the number of lantern projectors available. The same schools owned over 268,000 stereographs

in addition to another 63,601 owned by departments of education. These stereographs served as

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what Schiavo calls transcriptions of real world objects and locations that positioned student-

viewers in the scene through their revolutionary technology and reinforcement of inherently

American themes of patriotism, individualism, and positivism.

2.4 Ideological Implications

Although visual instruction, and the technologies that made it possible, undoubtedly

enhanced the worldview of students who were otherwise unable to access the far away locations,

peoples, and landmarks depicted therein, these technologies also came with their own set of

biases and implications. Since its invention, the stereoscope was seen not only to educate its

users about foreign locations but also to elevate them to the revered middle class and help them

shed their immigrant identities. A user's ability to partake in virtual travel gave them the

opportunity to see sites around the country and to scale the social ladder. Malin claims,

particularly in respect to images of foreign scenes, the stereoscope provided a lens through which

these low-tech exotic subjects in all of their three-dimensional glory could serve as further

proof of the modernity of its high-tech gaze (416). Once this technology was incorporated into

schoolhouse instruction, supplementary materials, like those distributed by Keystone View

Company, further reinforced ideas of a white middle-class identity and elevated the status of

white American schoolchildren who used them over the often old, savage, and low

subjects depicted in the cards. The lantern slide projectors glass slides similarly depicted scenes

of foreign peoples and used lecture cards to influence what students looked for, what they saw,

and how they saw it. This process transformed looking into an exercise of efficient scanning

and discrimination (Bak 148).

Trade publications promised images that were truthful and lifelike thanks largely to

advances in photography technology. Still, these images should not be viewed exclusively
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through a positivist lens. While these images and tools brought glimpses of the world that lay

beyond the reach of most of the devices users, its important to understand the role of

manipulation, especially the ways ideology was encoded in those images, in the use of visual

instruction. Although they offered unequaled visual access, images also specified and

controlled what and how students saw.

3. Future Trajectories and Reflections

Uncovering these complicated histories of visual instruction has motivated me to

critically consider future research I might do with this project. During this research process, we

uncovered much of the messiness that so many archival scholars write about in their methods;

we, like them, reveled in this messiness. Also, like Gold, we began to see the potential

trajectories unfold, revealing future incarnations of our work with visual instruction and teacher

training during the early twentieth century. This project feels like a book; I can start to sense the

series of articles or chapters that might evolve from this exhibit.

One chapter that I believe could get at the heart of the intersecting worlds of rhetoric,

composition studies, and visual instruction is an analysis of the articles published in Visual

Educationthe longest running journal on visual instructionand its contemporaries starting in

the 1920s and leading up to the end of World War II, before the rise in audiovisual education. I

am particularly curious about the writers who published in these journals. I want to know more

about who was publishing and offering advice as well as their relationship to the primary

audience for the journals. My curiosity stems from the knowledge that many of the leaders in the

field of visual instruction, including editors of these journals and officers in these organizations,

were men while those tasked with teaching using visual instruction methods were womenand

women of different backgrounds teaching in different locations with different resources

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available. I want to further examine the division of labor and authority in visual instruction under

the assumption that its flagship journal would beif not indicative of the field at largea

valuable place to start.

I also want to know more about the role visual rhetoric did or did not play in visual

instruction objectives. A great focus of our study for this exhibit was on the tools used to teach

the lantern slide, the stereoscope, the moving pictureand not the practices and activities

performed using these tools. There are innumerable connections to be made between visual

instruction and twenty-first century research in visual rhetoric and visual literacies as well as the

technologies being used to teach these concepts. It would be useful to articulate these

connectionsto look forward by looking backespecially in light of the troubling ideological

implications uncovered in the study of Keystone View Company and supplementary materials

offered to teachers.

These restrictions on students experiences offer us a cautionary tale about the use of

visual, and truly any, educational technologies. Google Cardboard and VR feel like the rippling

echoes of stereographic technology as they offer students unfettered access to the Colosseum and

Rio de Janeiro like Keystone did over a century ago. As we look back on Keystone, we should

consider the ways these new adaptive technologies open windows to the world while also

curtaining off certain pieces of it. We should not, as the stereographic cards and glass slide

guides did, tell students what to look forwe should ask them what they see. We should not just

give our students sterile data about a place or peoplewe should help them uncover contextual,

complicated truths. We should critically examine the object lesson the stereoscopic viewer and

the lantern slide projector offer us to seek not positivistic truth, but rather the multitude of

possibilities and narratives they offer up to us if we can just open our eyes to them.
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Works Cited

Bak, Meredith A. Democracy and Discipline: Object Lessons and the Stereoscope in American

Education, 18701920. Early Popular Visual Culture 10.2 (2012): 147-67. Taylor &

Francis Group. Web. 1 Apr. 2016.

Eisenhauer, Jennifer F. Next Slide Please: The Magical, Scientific, and Corporate Discourses of

Visual Project Technologies. Studies in Art Education 47.3 (2006): 198-214. JSTOR.

Web. 1 Apr. 2016.

Gold, David. Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of Writing Instruction in American

Colleges, 1873-1947. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. Print.

Malin, Brenton J. Looking White and Middle-Class: Stereoscopic Imagery and Technology in

the Early Twentieth- Century United States. Quarterly Journal of Speech 93.4 (2007):

403-24. Taylor & Francis Group. Web. 1 Apr. 2016.

McCormick, Virginia E. Educational Architecture in Ohio: From One-room Schools and

Carnegie Libraries to Community Education Villages. Kent: Kent State UP, 2001. Print.

Saettler Paul. The Evolution of American Educational Technology. 2nd ed. Englewood:

Information Age, 2004. Print.

Schiavo, Laura B. "From Phantom Image to Perfect Vision: Physiological Optics, Commercial

Photography, and the Popularization of the Stereoscope." New Media, 1740-1915. By

Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree. Cambridge: MIT, 2003. 116-32. Print.

Visual Education Association of California. Our Visual Education Problem. 1-8: Visual

Education Association of California, 1915. Library of Congress. Web. 1 Apr. 2016.