McCullough, D. O. (Author)
Rudolph, John L. (Advisor)
This project uses a historical case study of teacher-support programs at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City between 1880 and 1962 to better understand how science museums have come to be viewed as spaces for improving the effectiveness of classroom teachers. This study uses the concept of “pedagogical authority”—defined here as the socially constructed power to determine best practices for classroom teaching—to characterize the presumption of the museum’s value for teachers. By identifying the individuals, ideologies, and methods behind the museum’s support programs for teachers, including late-nineteenth century lantern slide lectures and school loans in the early-twentieth century, this project traces how museum-based scientists and educators, as well as professional educators, including teachers and school administrators, contributed to the AMNH’s pedagogical authority. When using these teacher-support programs as a lens, professional educators working alongside and within the AMNH emerge as the primary architects of the institution’s pedagogical authority. At various points in the AMNH’s history, school administrators, teachers, and museum educators with pedagogical training leveraged the museum’s resources to support classroom instruction by aligning museum programs with shifting school curriculums, filling perceived gaps in teacher education, and creating museum programs designed to address emergent national concerns about workforce development. The AMNH’s leadership, meanwhile, was driven to work with schools and teachers by the substantial annual subsidies the museum received from the City of New York. This research shows that educators were among the first groups of outside professionals to recognize that the AMNH (and museums writ large) could be used as a platform to help achieve desired outcomes. Moreover, by demonstrating the AMNH staff’s capacity to create educational programs specifically designed to meet their partners’ needs, this project sheds light on the integral role that the museum educators have played in developing the museum’s institutional identity. In doing so, this dissertation calls for further research on how educators have used museum-based educational programs to shape museums and classroom instruction alike.
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Article
Cain, Victoria;
(2011)
The Art of Authority: Exhibits, Exhibit-Makers, and the Contest for Scientific Status in the American Museum of Natural History, 1920--1940
(/isis/citation/CBB001034615/)
Article
Stillwell, Devon;
(2012)
Eugenics Visualized: The Exhibit of the Third International Congress of Eugenics, 1932
(/isis/citation/CBB001251110/)
Chapter
Braghini, Katya Mitsuko Zuquim;
(2014)
The Collection of Scientific Instruments of the Colégio Marista Arquidiocesano Museum, São Paulo: Origins, Context and Significance
(/isis/citation/CBB001420897/)
Book
Despy-Meyer, Andrée;
(2002)
Institutions and Societies for Teaching, Research and Popularisation: Proceedings of the XXth International Congress of History of Science (Liège, 20-26 July 1997) Vol. XIX
(/isis/citation/CBB685113092/)
Book
Andrée Despy-Meyer;
(2002)
Duplicate
(/isis/citation/CBB839350513/)
Article
Logan, Alison M. B.;
Pickering, Jane;
(2014)
A Museum of Ideas: Evolution Education at the Yale Peabody Museum during the 1920s
(/isis/citation/CBB001421593/)
Article
Bal, Mieke;
(1992)
Telling, showing, showing off
(/isis/citation/CBB000064779/)
Article
Mitman, Gregg;
(1993)
Cinematic nature: Hollywood technology, popular culture, and the American Museum of Natural History
(/isis/citation/CBB000039739/)
Article
Porter, Charlotte M.;
(1983)
The rise of Parnassus: Henry Fairfield Osborn and the Hall of the Age of Man
(/isis/citation/CBB000064813/)
Book
Rainger, Ronald;
(1991)
An agenda for antiquity: Henry Fairfield Osborn and vertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, 1890-1935
(/isis/citation/CBB000060798/)
Chapter
Rainger, Ronald;
(1988)
Vertebrate paleontology as biology: Henry Fairfield Osborn and the American Museum of Natural History
(/isis/citation/CBB000050407/)
Article
Rossi, Michael;
(2010)
Fabricating Authenticity: Modeling a Whale at the American Museum of Natural History, 1906--1974
(/isis/citation/CBB000954445/)
Article
Pinna, Giovanni;
(2009)
Exhibiting Evolution: An Essay upon the Museum's Subjectivity
(/isis/citation/CBB001020975/)
Book
Joachim Schummer;
Tom Børsen;
(2021)
Ethics of Chemistry: From Poison Gas to Climate Engineering
(/isis/citation/CBB169665595/)
Article
Marianne Klemun;
Marina Loskutova;
Anastasia Fedotova;
(2018)
Skulls and Blossoms: Collecting and the Meaning of Scientific Objects as Resources from the 18th to the 20th Century
(/isis/citation/CBB042290012/)
Chapter
Lauren Neitzke-Adamo;
A.J. Blandford;
Julia Criscione;
Richard K. Olsson;
Erika Gorder;
(2018)
The Rutgers Geology Museum: America’s first geology museum and the past 200 years of geoscience education
(/isis/citation/CBB701025048/)
Chapter
Claudine Cohen;
(2018)
Exhibiting life history at the Paris Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle (nineteenth–twenty-first centuries)
(/isis/citation/CBB437163939/)
Book
Gary D. Rosenberg;
Renee M. Clary;
(2018)
Museums at the Forefront of the History and Philosophy of Geology: History Made, History in the Making
(/isis/citation/CBB681993207/)
Thesis
Kasey Marie Sease;
(2021)
Marketing Agencies for Science: Nonprofits, Public Science Education, and Capitalism in Modern America
(/isis/citation/CBB197222725/)
Book
Johnson, Kristin;
(2012)
Ordering Life: Karl Jordan and the Naturalist Tradition
(/isis/citation/CBB001210068/)
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