Collections of Cultural History

Items and artefacts The museum’s items related to the history of teacher training are nationally significant. They comprise the first teaching aids and an extensive collection of classroom posters.
Photograps The photograph archive of the Jyväskylä University Museum contains more than 100,000 photographs from a 150-year period.
Special photo collections of Lauri Pihkala and Ahti Rytkönen Photograph collection of Lauri Pihkala, a sports enthusiast, and Lecturer Ahti Rytkönen’s photograph collection documenting the life of ordinary people are valuable special archives.

University museum’s collections related to the history of teacher training are nationally significant

The collection starts from the establishment of the Teacher Seminary for primary school teachers in 1863.
The museum’s collections include more than 10,000 items. The most common item types represent the broad range of the collections: handicrafts, drawings, notebooks, teaching aids, research equipment, chairs, shirts, classroom posters, flags, plates, card indexes, and more. The museum also documents contemporary issues.

The Jyväskylä Teacher Seminary started to collect didactic specimens. The oldest recorded articles include e.g. African spearheads, ancient Roman "scraps", and eared seal's whiskers. The collection also comprised seashells, rocks and stuffed birds which Uno Cygnaeus, the founder of the seminary, had brought from his trip to Alaska. Uno Cygnaeus's collection forms a valuable material of the museum.

The museum’s collections related to the history of teacher training are nationally significant. They comprise the first teaching aids of teacher training and an extensive collection of classroom posters. The collection of research equipment demonstrates the diversity of research conducted in different fields of science at the Jyväskylä College of Education and the University of Jyväskylä.

Today the collection consists of archives of predecessors of the university: Jyväskylä Teacher Seminary, College of Education and 1966 established University of Jyväskylä. It also contains the archives of the Student Union of the University of Jyväskylä.