Tools for teaching and learning in fashion that contribute to all our collective futures

Abstract:
How can we integrate the principles of design for sustainability into teaching and learning practice so that designers can share a collective approach whilst retaining their individuality? This requires a collective building of knowledge, skills and values in order to develop approaches and tools to individually engage with a collectively agreed set of challenges and opportunities. This is a very new approach for fashion design – a discipline characterised by its elusive nature, its secrecy and its fierce protection of ideas and rights to ownership. It requires a new approach where trust can be fostered and an understanding that it is not knowledge that gives creativity, it is its application. Through a nurturing of thinking, sharing and developing of knowledge and practice, we can evolve ways in which we can teach and learn better ways to approach both what we do and how we do it.

Introduction:
The fashion industry is based on a model of continual economic growth fuelled by ever-increasing consumption of resources. The un-sustainability of this model is widely acknowledged. Yet also acknowledged is the important role played by fashion products in our culture and the need to engage fashion students in the sustainability debate. The Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF) at London College of Fashion (LCF) was funded by ADM-HEA to engage different fashion course teams with ideas of sustainability literacy and develop new teaching and learning tools for engaging students.

Project Objectives:
To engage students and Higher Education teaching staff in the debates around sustainable literacy.

To share experiences, thoughts and knowledge of sustainability related to teaching and learning to inspire and enrich each other’s work.

To foster cross-disciplinary approaches to the development of sustainability literacy within or outside of the curriculum.

To outline approaches to fashion design education that work towards the embedding of more ecologically sound, socially mindful and culturally nurturing values and practice through teaching and learning.