THE POWER OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING
Learning English has become an essential part of 21st Century education. There are two billion people of all ages learning English around the world. These learners will use English as a tool in business, in science, on the internet, and in general to improve their opportunities to have better lives.
Learning materials have a chance to teach them English, but also to reach them with content that is meaningful, purposeful and relevant to their lives.
In this century, global awareness is a requirement and we believe you can’t understand the world if you don’t experience it. Photography helps us to deliver the world to learners. Photography stimulates learning. Photos inspire in a unique way; show a learner a photograph of something amazing or beautiful, or mysterious, or strange, or just unfamiliar but very real and that person will want to learn about it. And when people want to learn, they do.
Curiosity is critical in the classroom, and incredible photographs stimulate incredible curiosity. We look for photographs that would create awe in learners, awe and a desire to learn. We also look for photographs that would prepare learners for the real world that they will have to navigate.
Ultimately, photographs speak for themselves and help us achieve our mission of bringing the world to the classroom, and the classroom to life.
Ricardo Azarcoya
National Geographic Learning
Ricardo Azarcoya, a documentary photographer born in Mexico City who currently lives in the city of Querétaro, Mexico, studied at the Active School of Photography, as well as in Cuba and Spain.
Azarcoya was the first National Geographic Society Explorer (photographer and storyteller) of Latin America. He has collaborated on various projects with National Geographic, including the first exploration of the world's second largest sinkhole, El sótano del barro. He is also an expert photographer for National Geographic Expeditions for Latin America, as well as a speaker for National Geographic Partners.
Among many other achievements, Ricardo Azarcoya has been a Canon ambassador since 2009. He collaborated with the award-winning VII PHOTO Agency in New York City on various projects. He has founded events and organizations such as PhotoFest in 2012, an international festival of documentary photography and photojournalism in Mexico, and in 2021 he founded the Witness Visual Storytellers agency along with Cuban photographer Raúl Cañibano, an organization that brings photography to low-income people.
Thanks to the scholarship obtained with the APOYARTE award that Azarcoya received in 2020, he made the wonderful work Memorias de una generación, which was published in the National Geographic magazine in Spanish and for which he obtained the Best Edit award.
Azarcoya's work has been published in print media in different parts of the world, and has had more than 15 international exhibitions.