The Pedagogy and Problems of Jane Andrewsʹs The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball that Floats in the Air (1861)

This essay examines the interplay between Jane Andrewsʹs purpose and her pedagogy in The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball that Floats in the Air. The book demonstrates the teaching strategies she learned at the First State Normal in Massachusetts, moving from what the child knows to new material, engaging the child in personal observation and experiment, and introducing broad concepts before using precise terms. However, a sense of international children as distinctly “other” emerges from the authorʹs use of the white American reader as the point of comparison with the children of color she writes about.