Pestalozzi And The Picturebook: Visual Pedagogy In The Dinosaurs Of Waterhouse Hawkins

摘要

This article takes the 2002 picturebook The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins as a case study of a visual technology that prompts visual thinking about visual thinking. It is argued that contemporary illustrator Brian Selznick uses the picturebook format to represent and re-enact two nineteenth-century methods of visual thinking employed by the book's titular character: Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807-1894). When Hawkins built the first life-sized dinosaur models, his visualizations relied on the analytical visual techniques of Pestalozzian direct observation and Richard Owen's (1804-1892) scientific method of comparative anatomy. The analysis in this article reveals that Hawkins wanted the dinosaur models, in turn, to teach visual skills; the dinosaurs served Pestalozzian visual pedagogy. Selznick's illustrations and design show Hawkins' visual thinking. More significantly, the picturebook makes the viewer perform the same visual thinking processes. This article contributes to studies of how ways of seeing are learned through visual technologies.