Art Of Education

Visual communication lies at the heart of the CARGO resources. Each lesson features video, photography and a unique contemporary collage illustration.

In the image above you can see the 15 collages that make up CARGO Classroom. We hope that these illustrations will have a dual role for the educators who use our resources.

First, they give educators a range of inspiring and engaging depictions of individuals of African and African Diaspora heritage – something that has so often been missing in Western education. Last week we discussed how important framing is for inclusive education and these collages certainly help us to present African and African Diaspora histories from a position of accomplishment and achievement.

Second, each picture is a collage that uses a range of relevant and understandable images to tell the story of the individual about whom the lesson is focused. We know that learning happens when multiple connections are made in an engaged and attentive brain. We also know that both representation and relevance are important underliers for what makes something engaging. We are confident, therefore, that these CARGO collages will play an important role in facilitating learning in your classroom.

Before we put you back into the shoes of a student in a CARGO Classroom lesson, we want you to think about when you have used images in your classroom.

• How do you use images in your classroom?
• How do your students respond to images?
• What considerations do you make before putting images in front of your students?

Please use the comments section below to answer these questions.