Teaching Materials and the Fate of Dynamic Biology in American Classrooms after Sputnik

The technologies of classroom instruction have received scant attention from historians of technology. Yet schools, in particular science classrooms, abound with laboratory and instructional apparatus that play an important role in how students (and ultimately members of the public at large) learn about how science and scientists generate knowledge in a given disciplinary field. This article uses the post-Sputnik reforms in United States high school biology education as a case study to examine the way that the materials and technologies of biology teaching shaped ideas about the epistemology of life-science research during the cold war. It compares the experimental vision and materials produced by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, a National Science Foundation-funded, scientist-led reform project, with the materials developed by Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, a longstanding scientific supply company with deep roots in the more established, natural history epistemological tradition.