While Tavakolian's work is featured in many Western publications, it is not always intended for a Western audience. In her speech to the seventh biennial Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art, she used an old family photo to demonstrate how photography helps to build collective memory. Believing this framework to be largely missing in her country, Tavakolian shows that documentary photography is an important tool for witnessing and examining history. In response to Tavakolian's work, the author developed two lessons for their middle school students. For the first lesson, students were asked to document a typical Thursday morning at school. For the second lesson, a portrait studio was created tacking paper backdrops to the art room walls. The students worked in pairs to take each other's portraits. Students recognized that Tavakolian's work expanded their worldview both by introducing them to new things and by countering stereotypes.