Illustration in Adult Education - who do I depict and why?
Food for thought regarding the selection and production of images/illustrations for adult educational purposes: Who do I depict and why? Who don’t I depict and why?
With this checklist we invite you to reflect actively upon your use of images and illustrations in handouts, presentations an excercises offline and online.
Do we create our images for people who have easy access to education and who can already find themselves affirmed and depicted in educational illustrations? Or do we create them for people who until now have not been shown? The characters and actions we, as trainers, chose to depict in and on our teaching materials are a way to minimize exclusions toward an more inclusive education.
Within our Erasmus+ Project ScribbleMarathon - towards a more diverse visual language in adult education” (2021-2022) we developed together with representatives from defined target groups ( LGBTQI*, women, migrants and people of colour) an 8 point checklist “Food for Thought – Illustration in adult education” when selecting or creating our illustrations. This enables us to address target groups more directly.
Checklist
- Do I offer illustrations of people with varying skin colour?
- Do I offer illustrations of people of varying age?
- Do my illustrations lend themselves to gender diverse readings?
- Do I offer illustrations of people with varying body sizes?
- Which type of body is engaged in what activities and why (not)? Which tools and aids are used?
- What message does the clothing of the people I illustrate convey?
- When I take a closer look at specific educational materials I use, are both people depictions and their interactions varied?
- Do my illustrations offer the highest possible amount of identification opportunities (for my target group)?
All these thoughts contributed to our free "ScribbleM Image Database" of more than 400 diverse images ready to use under free creative commons licence.
Komentar
I really like this checklist…
I really like this checklist, also I will use it for improve my art. I like this diversification concept, but It's maybe bit hard to check all the points, but not to draw too much attention to this, because it (at least for me) is not the main message of the drawings. And I agree with the thinking about my target group, so if I know I will work with certain age group, I would put there more persons in their age and so for other points.