This paper aims to introduce educational history to multimodal studies by combining a source-oriented approach with multimodal social semiotics. We trace the role of objects and collections in teaching and learning, and focus on Strängnäs Secondary Grammar School in Sweden 1830-1960 as a case example. Closely examining original documents, remaining physical objects, and examples of their situated use as represented in photographs and drawings, the paper provides a nuanced perspective on how object-based pedagogy was applied. It traces how objects and artefacts were incorporated into the school’s collections, by the actions of different actors, in processes of recontextualisation and framing. The activity types that we use as examples, include: drawing lessons in art, weapons practice in physical education, plant collecting in botany, and map exercises in history. These examples show how objects and their meaning potential were used in teaching and learning, and how they realized certain discourses of schooling. Based on our examples, we can see how educational discourses such as progressivism came to have different impact in different subjects. While an authoritarian and national discourse prevailed in art and physical education, a scientific and progressive discourse seem to have been established in botany and history. By combining multimodality with historical research, we can understand meaning-making within a larger context of sociocultural practices and sociopolitical forces.

Karolina Widerström and Animal Dissection in Swedish Schools 1900–1920. This article examines the attempts to introduce dissections of small animals in Swedish primary schools and secondary girls’ schools during the early twentieth century. It demonstrates that the new teaching methods were a part of a further ambition to transform the pupil’s relationship to nature and how teachers taught the natural sciences. Knowledge of the human body was emphasised and produced in analogy with other species, leaving none of the body’s organs or basic functions outside the curriculum. One of the strongest voices in this process was the Swedish physician Karolina Widerström (1856–1948). Through hers—but also others—engagement in annual training courses in basic dissection techniques for female teachers and the production of wildly distributed illustrated dissection manuals, extensive effort was made to change the pupil’s understanding of nature in general as well as their own bodies including the fundamental principles of human reproduction.

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