The Rising x Remake Teaching Module on Sustainable Fashion
This article was originally published in April 2023.
I am a small business owner based in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, working in the luxury second-hand fashion space. I’m also a proud Remake ambassador and community organiser here in Canada, and the founder of RISING!
RISING began as a project during the last semester of my business degree while I was taking a social entrepreneurship course. The project was inspired by the need for a teaching resource for our local school district on the topic of homelessness. After collaborating with a local non-profit and countless educators, including my wonderful family, we released a resource and got a very positive, uplifting response from the teachers putting it to use in their classrooms.
RISING was born! We are now a team of educators and advocates dedicated to inspiring future generations of change makers.
We were inspired to continue this work to create another teaching module on another important topic: sustainability in the clothing industry. I was becoming increasingly passionate about this topic, and had recently become involved with the sustainable fashion movement as an ambassador with Remake, a global advocacy organization fighting for fair pay and climate justice in the clothing industry. So, we teamed up with Remake to build a new teaching tool to bring the topic of sustainable fashion into classrooms.
The fashion and textile industry is one of the biggest players when it comes to environmental impact and human rights violations. More than 100 billion garments are produced around the world annually and that number continues to grow at about 3% per year (source: Clean Clothes Campaign). Fashion production emits 4–8% of global carbon emissions annually, generates the fastest growing waste stream and pollutes rivers and streams through harmful dyes and chemicals. The industry employs 70 million people – mostly women of colour – worldwide in poverty wages and unsafe working conditions while profiting $2.5 trillion annually (source: Remake).
We strongly believe that young people have a crucial role to play in changing the fashion landscape for the better. This module utilises Remake resources combined with RISING teaching pedagogy to create an interactive, engaging, and empowering learning tool. We focus on learning from the voices of those with lived experiences and examining these challenges with a fair-minded, empathetic, and critical thinking mindset.
Photo from Unsplash
We wanted to give young people hope that they have the power to create change, and that there is power in knowledge, looking at things differently, and asking critical questions. Building this generation’s knowledge and critical thinking skills is at the heart of training the next generation of changemakers. What made the most sense was to allow educators to bring this topic to students so we could all start asking these vital questions and hopefully, all become change agents in the clothing industry. We created an in-depth look at social and environmental sustainability within the fashion industry through the use of engaging activities, provocations and project learning, to provide students and educators with tools to explore this urgent topic through a critical and empathetic lens.
“Building this generation’s knowledge and critical thinking skills is at the heart of training the next generation of changemakers. ”
The Rising x Remake Teaching Module on Sustainable Fashion is broken down into three units: People, Planet, and Power. The module utilises incredible resources from Remake such as original films telling the stories of garment workers around the world, educational articles, and impactful images of the realities of the clothing industry. Educators have the freedom to utilise the units separately or combine all three units for roughly ten hours of instructional and project-based learning to give students a chance to dive into as many facets of this complex industry as possible.
By piloting this project over the last year and a half, we have been able to test these resources with various age groups, demographics and learning environments while continuously getting feedback from students and educators. Now it’s time to have the resource openly available to everyone! There’s so much to explore, and we are treating these tools as a jumping-off point to spark discussion and passion around the story behind our clothing, provoke critical analysis of the fashion industry and its impact on people and our planet, and ultimately inspire young people to want to learn more and realise the power they have to create positive change.
There are so many points to enter this conversation and ways to create positive change. By providing tools for exploring and discussing these complex topics, students can discover areas they would like to learn more about and ways to participate as individuals, with their families, or with school or community groups to build a more just and equitable clothing industry.
Educators, students, parents, and anyone interested in utilising these resources in their learning environment can get involved by heading to our website.
They can also reach out to me directly at info@risingeducation.org