Contextual Background
I co-run a module on that is part of a multi-pathway program with MA Fashion Histories and Theories, MA Fashion Image and MA Fashion Communications students. The course itself is called ‘Re-imagining Fashion Histories: Tracing Parallel Cosmologies’ and culminates in a group presentation that asks the students to imagine an alternative future or world that addresses the problems of the current moment. Last year, the presentations lacked research rigor and creative imaginings; this year, the discussions have been fraught with political tension.
Evaluation
To tackle, what we perceived as the apathy of the student body, my co-convenor and I spent time in the first session to deliver a robust project brief. This included examples of imagining Otherwise from makers, artists and practitioners, who both sought to envision into a future, but also retrieved mythologies from the past. The project was originally derived from Amy Twigger Holroyd’s Fashion Fictions (Holroyd, 2021-2023), which we referenced, but we adapted our version to emphasise frameworks of coloniality and alternative temporalities. This helped the students to deliver robustly researched projects this year. However, we were challenged with tensions between students who grew up in America as racialised people. One student had voiced sentiments that agitated several members in the class, regarding cultural appropriation and racialised violence. I was advised by a student after the class that I should have shut down the conversation, but there were several students who had their hands up and wanted to participate in the discussion.
Moving forwards
Now in the second year and second iteration, I feel that the initial problems of apathy were effectively motivated by a clear project brief that demonstrated examples from alternative imaginings. We also revised some of the seminar readings to ensure accessibility, and it seemed that the students were much more engaged with the theoretical underpinnings of the module itself. In my first case study, I wrote about the privilege of being in an arts classroom, and my surprise this year of having to moderate and yield agitating perspectives, but this is undoubtedly a reflection of the political polarisation around the world.
John Palfrey asks: ‘Must a community tolerate intolerance in the name of free expression?’ (Ibargüen IN Palfrey, 2017, iv), which reflected my own questions as I heard in the aftermath of one such class that one of the students was crying in the bathroom. The student who had advised me that I should have shut down the conversation was a racialised student and asked why these teachings of colonial histories have to bear so much more weight upon the racialised students. I wondered whether the opportunity to learn from tense conversations should outweigh the trauma that particular students could face. Lee Bollinger’s tolerance theory ‘holds that the act of forgiving those who express hurtful views develops empathy and strength in those who forgive’ (Palfrey, 2017, p. 119), thus I conclude that having these conversations is not only necessary, but learning how to mitigate differences is a crucial learning outcome. The problem is also time itself – should the module have taken place over ten weeks, rather than five, perhaps some of these tensions could have been productively debated.
In the future, I will plan to incorporate histories of discussion in the classroom, including Palfrey’s strategies for mitigation. Perhaps an oversight was our understanding of the discussion abilities of an MA co-hort. In my last session, I gathered that the students felt apprehensive about critiquing group projects wanting to encourage each other instead. If discussion skills were taught in the first session alongside the delivery of the project brief, and then simultaneously encouraged with each successive seminar, then perhaps each student would feel empowered to mitigate when tense conversations and viewpoints arise.
References
Holroyd, A.T. (2021-2023). Fashion Fictions. [online] Available at: https://amytwiggerholroyd.com/Fashion-Fictions [Accessed 12 Mar. 2025].
Palfrey, J (2018) Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces: Diversity and Free Expression in Education. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.