Nature tables and pocket museums. From the Leicestershire classroom to the Mountain View Center for environmental education

Abstract

This paper is part of a wider research initiative which is tracing the travel of ideas, practices and people from Leicestershire infant and primary schools to and from the USA during the 1960s and 70s. It takes as a starting point a drawing of a 1969 Leicestershire primary classroom detailing precisely the site of furniture, material objects, display boards, water sources, ‘growing things’, live animals, book racks and floorspace. The drawing, executed as a birds-eye view, has been reconstructed from memory by the teacher who had inhabited that space and with reference to a 1972 publication detailing an approach to environmental education that found its way to influence teacher development in the United States. This publication, written by the same teacher and her
husband, was entitled Yesterday I Found and was funded by the Ford Foundation and published by the Mountain View Center for Environmental Education, Boulder Colorado. Two contemporary essays outlining theoretical propositions with regard to pedagogical relationships between people, place and things are considered alongside this publication in order to illuminate multi disciplinary interpretations of classroom dynamics in the 1960s English primary school. The paper argues that the impact of this period of experimentation and exchange reached far beyond those decades of intense activity and travel and that the material conditions of the classroom as recalled from a teacher’s point of view can aid to demonstrate that continuity.