Collaborative Pedagogies for Social Justice: Insights from the 'Fashion Practices for Social Change' Unit

The fashion industry sits at the intersection of global crises relating to climate, social and racial injustices. Preparing students to navigate – and critically tackle – these challenges is increasingly important. Despite the emergence of pedagogical approaches foregrounding collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and engagement with real-world contexts, research on how students experience such programmes in creative higher education remains limited.

This paper presents insights from the Fashion Practices for Social Change unit at London College of Fashion, UAL. The unit brings together students from diverse master’s courses and aims to cultivate the skills and mindsets needed to imagine and enact fashion practices for social change. It asks students to work in multidisciplinary teams and respond to live briefs co-developed with external industry and community partners. The qualitative evaluation of the unit draws on in-depth interviews with students, project partners and the unit lead, and a participatory process in which student researchers contributed to data analysis.

Findings highlight the challenges and opportunities of collaborative approaches within creative education. Effective multidisciplinary collaboration can shift students’ understandings of their creative identities, and their future professional careers. Students reported that responding to real-world briefs helped bring to life complex issues around climate, racial, and social justice. However, when students struggled to collaborate, the transformative potential of the unit was reduced.

In conclusion, the paper argues for the need for educators to scaffold collaborative skills, and design interdisciplinary experiences that retain what is effective in studio-based teaching while responding to global and institutional pressures shaping the future of education.