The pedagogical museum of the university of Huelva

The Pedagogical Museum of the University of Huelva is located in the Faculty of Education Science in the Campus del Carmen.

Its 300-m2 permanent exhibition consists of three sections – School Manuals, Teaching Resources, and Educational Places.

This section presents several representative books from different historical periods – from 1776 to 1975. Besides, there is a video on certain interesting aspects of schoolbooks –gender differentiations, ideologies, the elaboration of schoolbooks by teachers, the publishing of encyclopaedias, and so on.

The section starts with a sample of the basic school supplies and goes on with a selection of teaching means from different subjects – Reading and Writing, Drawing, Weights and Measures, Arithmetic, Geometry, Natural Science, Geography, and so on.

As a whole, the resources exhibited offer a historical view of schools and the means used for teaching.

We must especially point out the remarkable collection of microscopes, with models from the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century.

The collection of audio-visual resources must be also remarked, as it includes several nineteenth-century devices which were the precursors of those used in school throughout the following century.

Magic lanterns, stereoscopes, slides, 3-D photographs, etcetera conform a group of resources which help us understand the evolution of audio-visual technology and its impact on the following historical periods.

The last section shows a sample of games related to several different school subjects together with an illustrated reference to traditional rewards and punishments.

Three locations are reproduced – an ancient escuela de amiga (‘school of female friend’, for very young children and especially girls), a typical workplace for maestros cortijeros (wandering teachers who taught both children and illiterate adults in Andalusian villages), and an ancient classroom which shows a large period in the history of education in the twentieth century. The section is completed with several maps and scale models.

The Pedagogical Museum also has a wide collection of photographs, which are part of the future School Photograph Archive of Huelva.

Besides, there are also several excellent documents – both originals and figured copies from certain file documents – related to the history of education in Huelva.