The Podcast
An exciting project from the first year students in fashion design at Drexel University. A project designed with inquiry-based learning (IBL) to help students explore the complex topic of sustainability in the fashion industry. As a concept, “sustainability” is ubiquitous in fashion education. The challenge I continually see is that fashion educators are both telling students what the problem is and giving them ideas or concepts on how to solve it. This always appeared limiting to me as students will eventually go out in the industry and need to affect change. The goal of using an IBL framework is to create learning opportunities where students have agency in the research from start to finish. It’s not necessarily about being completely correct or earning the highest grade. The goal of any IBL project is progression of knowledge. In this project students researched a variety of issues on sustainability in the fashion industry and created their own research questions which they answered through the creative development of their podcasts. The final product is raw, but still passionately curious and captures the spirit of first year students.
