Teaching manuals and the blackboard: accessing historical classroom practices

Abstract

The blackboard, a useful teaching tool in nineteenth-century England, was transformed into a teaching necessity in the decades follwing 1870, when the Education Acts made school free and mandatory for all children. The resulting huge population of schoolchildren inspired the development of teaching techniques appropriate for large-group learning. Many of these techniques relied on the blackboard as a reusable demonstration space visible to the entire class at once, unlike a book or slate. To share these new practices among teachers, particularly the novice teachers recruited to serve the increased school population, dozens of teaching manuals were published around the turn of the twentieth century. These manuals’ instructions for how to teach reading, writing, arithmetic and nature study to elementary school students offer historians a rare glimpse into teachers’ and students’ school experiences by suggesting how the blackboard shaped classroom practices in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England.