I knew students had heard the word oppression before and so in order to see what they knew I had them create these visual representations.  The images students created were so good that I used them in class to help teach what oppression was.  The students included important symbols like fists, a hand in chains, being stepped on, and a mouth being covered that help get across what oppression “looks like”. Students analyzed their peers images for the common words, images and themes and this helped us build a language to talk about oppression and think about the different aspects of oppression. When I actually taught oppression, it was important for students to create examples of these based in slavery, so I had them find examples from our primary text.  We discussed good examples of each aspect and I had them make sure their example matched how we were defining them.