Quand la chambre fait école. Images et usages pédagogiques de la chambre d’enfant

Abstract

This study focuses on representations of the child's bedroom in various school materials from the 1880s to the 1950s. The documents examined, which come from the collections of the Musée national de l'Éducation, are French, reading, and picture books, as well as wall charts. By exploring school notebooks in addition, we wish to confront figurative representations made by adults, accompanied by children’s words. From the end of the 19th century onwards, descriptions of the bedroom became a subject for students to write about.The historiography of the children's room finds sources among these school materials that should not be credited with documentary value. We will analyze these representations: they are artistic objects, which call for a semiotic and symbolic study, conducted using recurrent motifs in these images (Panofsky 1969, Schapiro 1973), but they are also mental, individual and/or social constructions (Jodelet 1984). This data is interpreted with regard to the purposes and specificities of their medium, which impose different representations of the children's room. All these factors generate a collective image, which is sometimes conventional and inherited from traditions, and other times new, linked to the novelty of the tools and methods. By juxtaposing it with representations from children's literature, we will define specific features, linked to school usage, and common features, specific to the same period.

Keywords

• child’s room
• pedagogy
• conference
• picture book
• social representation
• textbook