Glass lantern slides and visual instruction for school teachers in early twentieth-century Argentina

Abstract

The first institution to promote teacher training for the elementary education system in Argentina – Escuela Normal de Paraná – was created in 1871. Among many teaching aids, this institution had an important collection of lantern slides. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the place of images and visual instruction in the training of teachers in Argentina in the early twentieth century. The paper explores the geographical sub-collection of an archive of 4700 glass lantern slides by focusing on its topics, visual content and structure. The archival organization is analyzed to understand its use as a modernizing pedagogy in an institution that privileged expertise in teaching methods. It is argued that the pedagogic use of lantern slides raised two areas of tension. On the one hand, as a visual technology associated with entertainment, lantern slides had to be recontextualized as a pedagogic aid. On the other hand, the lack of awareness of Argentinean landscapes in foreign slide collections became a problematic issue particularly in the teaching of geography. In order to be conceived as an appropriate form of visual imagery displayed in schools, glass lantern slides were reframed as part of a scientific method of instruction and a national corpus of knowledge.