Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Lessons on common objects, known as ‘object lessons’, were a customary occurrence in Victorian schoolrooms. This article looks at Victorian object lessons around mid-century as a means of examining the variety of meanings that common objects, and particularly manufactured objects, might have held both inside and outside Victorian schoolrooms. While model scripts for object lessons circulated widely and clarified the meaning of common objects in print, the objects themselves had the potential to complicate and challenge these meanings. Drawing primarily on publications by Elizabeth Mayo and the Home and Colonial School Society (established in 1836), this article outlines the theological, industrial and imperialist ways of looking that informed the model object lesson. Yet close study of the objects employed in object lessons – feathers, an object lesson specimen box, and a series of illustrations of animals – demonstrates how full sensory engagement with material objects can disrupt these disciplined ways of looking and learning. The final section of the article describes the decline of object lesson pedagogies once they were established within the official curriculum for England and Wales over the course of the 1880s and 1890s. Increasingly, pictures and nature study came to replace common objects in Victorian schoolrooms, and had their own implications for the ways that schoolchildren were taught to look at and learn from the world around them.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".