Collection of Teaching Materials and Teaching Aids

The Collection of Teaching Materials and Teaching Aids gives an insight into didactically formulated sources of cognition and learning and into various didactic aids for teachers and pupils. Teaching materials and teaching aids used in the classrooms of primary and secondary schools in all regions of Croatia have been collected since the first exhibition of teaching aids held in Zagreb in 1871. The purpose of exhibitions was to present new teaching aids to teachers and reveal new possibilities for the improvement of classroom teaching. Some teachers also appeared as innovators, creating teaching aids for mathematics – for instance, Franjo Šimunović (fraction calculator, bead calculator) and Mirko Tkalec (Prausek-Tkalec calculator) in the 1880s.

Almost 4,000 Museum items in this Collection originate from the period between the end of the seventeenth century and the present and they enable an insight into various kinds of didactic transformations, materials, techniques of making and into their function in the teaching process. The largest number of items dates from the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. The collection includes didactic materials and aids from all school subjects, with the oldest ones related to geography – geographical maps, globes, wall-mounted boards and lithographs.

The collection of teaching materials and teaching aids contains pupils’ school stationery (rulers, compasses, pencil cases, pens), as well as anatomical body parts (for the subject of health education), slides, animal preparations (for natural history), globes and models of racial types (used in geography and anthropology), but mostly it consists of wall-mounted boards. Since they enabled presentation of a wide range of content, wall-mounted boards were used for almost all teaching subjects. They were a kind of multimedia of teaching at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The Croatian School Museum continually exhibits the items held in the Collection of Teaching Materials and Teaching Aids in its permanent exhibition, as well as in occasional temporary exhibitions.

Kristina Gverić, MA
Senior Curator