Teacher showing photos to kids of victorian dead children - slightly disturbing

[whyiwonderwhy]

I am finding this so disturbing I can't sleep! However I might be being oversensitive, who knows. It is the "but - WHY?" bit which is bothering me most.

The lesson was about the industrial revolution, and the subject of photography came up, 2 of the earliest photos were shown to the class (13-14yo) and then....I wish I could say the teacher showed photos of some of the extraordinary engineering inventions of the day, or of busy streets, or China, or something wonderful and extraordinary...but no, the teacher showed 10 photos of dead children and talked about how the Victorians would photograph dead children as though they were still alive, with the rest of the family, in a commemorative way. I have seen some in the past (I didn't learn about it at school however) and they are moving and tragic and disturbing. Nothing else, just these photos.

Just wondering...why? why would the teacher do this? Any ideas?

This teacher has form by the way. A lot of it. But this has for some reason blindsided me.

@nyancatdays, I think we would be friends. Maybe we already are in real life? Loved your posts.

This is interesting too - though for slightly different reasons - who funds the research institute you are part of?

😆 I have a 12 yo DD who is interested in history, and I’d have no problem with her seeing postmortem photographic images. The people who posed them took pains to make them look beautiful and painterly for the parents and families, even overly sanitised and aestheticised, so they are hardly gruesome corpse photography.

Why not tell the kids about them in the spirit of engaging their interest in the period, and the development of photography as a technology? Photography is one of the reasons we have records of the Industrial Revolution and its machined and buildings. The Industrial Revolution also depended on some of the same technologies for mechanisation, and eg. for industrial glass production (important for daguerreotypes which are exposed straight onto glass plates), but also for creating the kind of glass buildings that the Crystal Palace showcased, and all sorts of other 29th things like shop windows, street lighting and big cruise ships, to name a few.

In one of the links I posted from the Clements library at the university of Michigan, you can even see a stereoscopic postmortem daguerreotype— these used new scientific understanding of how the brain produces depth vision to produce a 3D image. Exhibitions like the Great Exhibition weren’t just about displaying big machines, but also visual technologies like stereoscopy. How quickly photography became the technology of the age can hardly be underestimated!

Thank you! Do drop me a DM (if they are working again); we might know each other already or be part of some of the same research networks! ❤️👍

It’s funded by a company called Flash Bang Wallop - From Beyond the Grave 💀 👻

This is nothing to do with this thread, but to answer it sounds as though the person talking at the museum was good at communicating with the kids. It sounds fine to me. Some children will be more sensitive than others because of lived experiences or strong imaginations, but on the face of it it sounds fine.

People posting here are missing the point of the thread. They have mentioned things like the holocaust and Stalin - DC is familiar with both. Not relevant to how this teacher teaches.

But in relation to teaching these subjects generally, I think there is a balance in how these subjects should be presented. If it is too traumatic it shuts down the brain, inhibits learning. The fact that some of these kids will be playing violent video games or "seeing worse" on the net actually makes the situation worse. Just because they have been exposed to inappropriate things already is not at all a reason to continue doing so. the opposite applies in fact. To help children recover from trauma they need a bit of a breather from it. You can present all these subjects sufficiently to communicate the important points without traumatising (or retraumatising) children. There is no need and no benefit.

Also, in your average class in senior school, many of the children will have already experienced real life trauma, much of it not propertly processed and so presenting things showing OTT imagry or footage is arguably a somewhat cognitively challenged thing to do. it is a question of balance and good judgement.

Most research institutes, and nearly all of the ones in humanities subjects, are part of universities, so they are funded by the universities themselves, university library research endowments, and/or partly by grant income from research funds (in both the U.K. and the US). They will normally be embedded in a university department or school, and will bring together visiting scholars, senior professors, and PhD students.

A research institute in a humanities subject in the US will most often be at what used to be called an “R1” (or big, top-tier) university.

In U.K. universities some humanities research institutes (or some posts in them) are part-funded by the U.K. research councils.

Or something to do with societies and - cough cough - democracy perhaps!

But there are private funders too, of universities and research institutes?

You have said all of above 🤣

Sorry posted on wrong post - edited

In the sciences, sometimes, though a research institute named after a big donor will not normally all be funded by the donor. It will usually be co-funded by a university department and keeps going on a mixture of central department/university and “soft money” (grant application) funds.

In the arts and humanities, not really. There are named libraries and named chairs (professorships) and PhD posts and so on, but they are usually just named for legacy or partial bequests, and the core funding to run them is normally from the university department itself. But it’s not really a thing for research institutes to be solely run by private funders. The costs dwarf many times what even most super-rich can afford.

I don't think you have read all my posts, have you?!

I agree with you that the development of photograph in the context of the IR is very interesting. Sounds as though we would not be on the same page when it comes to child development though!

I'd report this for being as clearly fake as it is but there's a wealth of very interesting information about postmortem photography that I wouldn't want to be lost

I’m responding very precisely to your posts, especially the ones about trauma. The entire point was that these images were not meant to be “OTT” or traumatic. They were usually meant to look like portraits, and were for keepsakes, for family remembrance, and to show other people as a form of comfort. The photographers were normally at pains to make the photographs as beautiful, even as sentimental, as possible.

Is a 13 or 14 year old going to be traumatised by seeing a photograph of a baby on a bier of flowers, made to look like it’s sleeping? Or the one I linked to by Le Blondel, which is deliberately made to look like a painting of a father watching over a sleeping child?

Early cameras were not capable of taking images of moving people, or indeed images somewhere dark. Which rules out the 'kids working down't pit' scenario.

Tell you what, though. Of all the history lessons these kids teenagers sit through, which information will they actually remember? Yes - the invention of photography.

@murasaki I was thinking about this and another conversation I had about teaching history recently - when you were taught about Stalin and the gulags, were you also taught about other aspects of the Soviet Union under Stalin, such as industrialisation, role of the soviet union in 2nd ww, how Stalin implemented Marx-Lenin ideas and how that differed from other communist leaders etc? The person I spoke to said that they only talked about gulags and repression - whereas when I was at school it was taught more comprehesively.

It’s clear you don’t like this teacher and you’re trying your hardest to get her disciplined or worse! You come across as a real piece of work, nasty and spiteful! You posted on her in the hope of getting everyone on your side, it’s very clear that hasn’t happened and now you’re dismissive or argumentative of everyone with a different view to yours. You need a lie down to get over your sleepless nights!

None of the teens in DC's class "love a bit of shock value" and most really could do without it

Direct implication that you know every child in the class and what they like/dislike/respond to.

I know the kids and yes I would be able to engage the class without resorting to this sort of weirdness.

Further implying that you know every child and that you can engage the class better than the teacher can.

History should be taught giving a broad base level of knowledge first, and then specialising gradually, gradually narrow your field of study/specialised interests. A "powerful lens" is the wrong way round for children. They need the basic knowledge, the structure of the subject, the foundations, first.

Your opinion, not the way the curriculum states anywhere that history or any other subject should be taught. Presenting your own opinion as fact and implying a curricular knowledge that you clearly don’t have. Unless you can link something that shows history should be taught your way?

It wasn't relevant to the subject matter being taught, and wasn't appropriate in the context for a number of reasons. If you are an academic you are possibly out of touch with the needs of 13/14 year olds.

Your opinion, not fact, the teacher obviously does feel it’s contextually appropriate, but again implying that both the teacher in your post and the academic you are responding to don’t know what they are doing and that you know better.

I meant, have you read my posts from Friday night? You are not responding to what I said about these images at all.

Your knowledge of history sounds interesting, but as I said I think you and I would differ about what is and is not useful and appropriate for teens (or tweens in your case)

That is my view - yours is different - that is fine.

Your summaries here are good. Your other post said something different and was nonsense. HTH

Of course it is of relevance. You’ve been talking about what is appropriate and my point was that children interact with death in all different types of formats and from very young ages and do so without being so disturbed they can’t sleep.

You keep claiming the pictures are traumatic but they aren’t- the things shown on the news at 6 every night are far more disturbing than family memorial pictures.

I expect the glorious engineering will also be shown. YABU, they're not 5 and it's a part of our history.

I think you're just incapable of being wrong

I just read Mid Term Break by Seamus Heaney to my Year 11s just to show them how powerful simple words can be. It isn’t on the curriculum or even my lesson plan.
I don’t apologise for it.