Sustainability and Social Responsibility

Measuring the “Clothing Mountain”: Action Research and Sustainability Pedagogy to Reframe (Un)Sustainable Clothing Consumption in the Classroom

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Abstract

There is an urgent need for disseminating sustainability-related knowledge across the Textile and Apparel (T&A) discipline because students in T&A-related areas commonly perceive fashion products as disposable (Connell & Kozar, 2012; Paulins etal., 2020) and also have difficulty making the connection between clothing consumption and sustainability (Yan et al., 2017). This study contributes to the scholarship on sustainability education in the postsecondary T&A field by providing practical guidance on embedding sustainability pedagogy into a class project. Specifically, the current study sought to support transformative learning through a class project examining students’ unsustainable clothing consumption behaviors using both action research and the holistic principles of the Burns Model of Sustainability Pedagogy (Burns, 2009). This study had three main objectives: 1) to engage students in action research in which students were asked to measure the clothing volumes they bought, used, and discarded during one school semester; 2) to identify the various aspects of students’ unsustainable clothing consumption behaviors; and, 3) to use educational intervention as a pedagogical tool to expand students’ awareness of their unsustainable clothing consumption behaviors. The overriding goal was cultivating learners who would become capable of affecting holistic sustainable change.

Keywords: sustainability, unsustainable consumption, pedagogy, action research

How to Cite:

Jestratijevic, I. M. & Hillery, J. L., (2022) “Measuring the “Clothing Mountain”: Action Research and Sustainability Pedagogy to Reframe (Un)Sustainable Clothing Consumption in the Classroom”, International Textile and Apparel Association Annual Conference Proceedings 79(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/itaa.15983