ABSTRACT
It is not uncommon in local museums to find reconstructed classrooms of the past, especially the late Victorian elementary classroom. Rows of uniform seating, slates, a blackboard, a high teacher’s desk, a globe and a framed picture or two constitute the classroom. Yet there is a silence in that elementary classroom. What were the routines and the language which inhabited its space? What was its pedagogical order and how was the National Curriculum mediated in its spaces? What was the lived reality of the teacher’s work, in and around that classroom?
