Teachers who wish to participate in 100 People: a World Portrait, are invited to use it as a class project. The framework is simple: contribute to our world portrait by asking students to celebrate someone in your community through photography and writing and share information about your part of the world. The assignment is to nominate and photograph an individual who has inspired the student, someone who is a citizen of the country in which they live. The photograph should be accompanied by a written description of the individual's age, gender, nationality, religion, and language, with an explanation of what this person has done to inspire the nomination for the 100 People project.

International schools are encouraged to partner with a local school to make nominations. The goal of local school partnerships is to gain a breadth of involvement from different national and international community perspectives. This collaborative approach can enrich the student experience and help make deeper connections into the community.

Many variations on the assignment are possible. The entire class might choose one person to photograph, creating many different interpretations of the individual. Or, each class member might be asked to find a person to nominate individually, as Jennifer Henbest de Calvillo's class from the International School of Yangon in Myanmar did. Jennifer's students found members of their community that they wanted to celebrate and presented us with photographs and essays of each. Kimberly Sajan from the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics has created a class project to interpret the statistics we use to describe the world population as portraits, so that a student must visually represent 61 Asians; or 30 children; or 17 people living without clean safe water. We welcome your interpretation of the assignment.

Please contact us directly and let's find a way to work together to create a world portrait. This assignment to your class has the potential to start a dialogue of understanding of who we are and what place we occupy in the world. The artwork will go beyond the classroom and become part of a growing art project that will show students how vital their thoughts and artwork are.

We welcome your involvement and look forward to hearing from you.