The semester wrap features some student work from three bachelor programs and an interview with Emma Yench about her role in the transition to online teaching and learning. We also congratulate Professor Lijing Wang, who was awarded ARC research funding, and the School of Fashion and Textiles postgraduate students who presented their research at the PRS!
And in other exciting news, the Houndstooth Wrap website has also received a new look to wrap up the semester!
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Fashion, Textiles, Place and Story
Fashion Textiles Place and Story (FTPS) is a new offering for 2020. The course was developed by course coordinators Tarryn Handcock and Verity Prideaux and taught alongside tutors Liliana Pomazan, Lisa Carroll, Fernanda Quilici Mola and Anna Anismova. Verity Prideux said: “For the first time, approximately all 250 of our first-year students came together on day one of semester one to learn about Indigenous Australian perspectives and practices, including ‘caring for country’, and begin to consider our shared stories and futures within the fashion and textiles industry.”
“FTPS is all about understanding how diverse stories, knowledges, skills and perspectives contribute to fashion and textiles, locally and globally. And about how to share, know and reflect on these stories, now and ongoing, as students move forward through the next 3 years of their study and further afield into work and industry.”
“In week one, we learnt two indigenous phrases Womin Djeka and Dhumbah Goorowa and returned to these throughout the semester to frame the courses focus on stories of place and experiences of belonging. Womin Djeka in the local Boon Wurrung language means welcome, but like many Aboriginal words it is also conceptual. A more authentic translation is ‘welcome, come – what is your purpose or intent?’. While Dhumbah Goorowa means a commitment to share.
Our goals for the course outcomes were to learn more about respecting Australian Indigenous understandings of place and connection to country. To develop skills around reflective thinking and doing. And lastly to welcome the students in and help them make the first few steps in finding their place in fashion and textiles and to develop confidence to share their stories and collaborate with others.
The course is divided into 3 parts: Place, Our Business and Sharing. Throughout the course students kept an observation journal and used it to explore the process of observation, sharing, listening, thinking and reflection. Journals use text and visuals to discuss and reflect on class content and activities, they are a standard way of practicing and organising thinking and research. Reflection was based on Gibb’s reflective cycle and throughout the course we asked many questions and provided prompts to assist with the reflection process.
In weeks 1-4, the focus was on Place and developing a framework around stories. Students completed the Womin Djeka Indigenous Orientation online Micro credential and we looked at the notion of stories through the concept of place by exploring why do we tell stories, ways of finding stories, ways of knowing & experiencing stories and ways of sharing & telling stories.”
“In weeks 5-8, we shifted the focus to Our Business by exploring some of the shared stories within fashion and textiles. For this, a series of online workshops were developed involving a taster of a range of important issues told from local and global as well as broad and individual perspectives.
Workshops were presented by the course teachers and included Stories in Garments, Visible Mending, Ethics and Cultural Appreciation/Appropriation, Creative Reuse, Coding and Decoding Storyboards, Fashion and Modernism and Terroir Colour. Additionally, we were particularly blessed to have guest lecturers joining us to present workshops and would like to thank Sang Thai for Fashioning Intersectionality, Jo Cramer for It’s my Favourite! and Jenny Underwood for Fashion Futures: What is possible, plausible, probable, preferable?
These sessions were a mix of live and fixed content delivered through Canvas and Collaborate Ultra and provided staff with an opportunity to explore online delivery and student engagement using various tools and technologies. It was a chance to get the hang of breakout groups, sharing screens and videos, interactive whiteboards and group brainstorming, develop recording methods and hone our chat skills, sometimes all at once!”
“Over 3 weeks, students could pick and mix which workshops they wanted to interact with and were asked to document and record the workshop activities using text, mind mapping, drawing, making, reflection and visuals in their observation journals. For this middle part of the course our main framing questions were – What did you do? How did you do it? Who was present/involved? How did you contribute to the experience? What was the outcome?
The aim being to lead the students through Our Business to Your Business and starting to find and identify their individual interests and concerns as well as reflection on what they would like to explore further in the field of Fashion and Textiles.
This culminated in each student presenting online a PechaKucha style PowerPoint show and tell of their experiences within the workshops. It was perhaps a huge leap of faith to propose that 250, year 1 students present online in Collaborate Ultra – all in the one day. But we did, there were some glitches, there were some tech and sound issues, but there was also a lot patience and learning. The students presented an array of amazing PechaKucha’s generously sharing their experiences and depth of interaction in the workshop content.”
“Then in the final weeks the focus shifted to Sharing and starting to frame and tell their own story within the field of fashion and textiles by returning to the spirit of Womin Djeka and answering the question – What is your business or intent? How do you want to practice within the field of fashion and textiles? Within this the aim was for the students to develop an individual response that recognised their personal position, values, approaches and interests. Students were also introduced to mapping out a Community of Practice and started to consider what was their developing domain and who were the people in their network of learning.
This final part of the course involved the writing of a statement of intent and the creation of an artefact that could be shared with their peers via a course discussion post. Students also interacted and commented on each other’s work within the discussion.”
“For FTPS, the transition to online learning in week 4 meant rethinking the ways we come together, especially for a year 1 cohort who had had limited opportunity to get to know their peers within the face-to-face learning environment. We endeavoured to provide the class content in a variety of formats so that depending on their circumstance’s students could engage in real time or in their own time.”
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Bachelor of Textiles (Design)
In a fantastic learning-from-home activity, students were asked to watch a film and note the colours and patterns featured in the costumes and sets. Designed by Lisa Carroll, Contemporary and Ethical Textiles lecturer, the activity has been very popular and filtered beyond RMIT. See the Bachelor of Textile (Design) instagram, @rmit_btdes, for more examples.
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Bachelor of Fashion and Textiles (Sustainable Innovation)
The development of a digital folio in the Bachelor of Fashion and Textiles (Sustainable Innovation) program showcased a range of digital tools and apps that were learner-directed and taught in class. The subject matter of the representational images was chosen by students, although may have communicated the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were a focus of other assessments.
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Interview with Emma Yench
What has been your role during the transition?
I am from the DSC Digital Learning team, and I was already working with the school on the program redevelopment project, so when we found out we’d have to move everything (very rapidly) online, I was kind of Johnny-on-the-Spot with my understanding of digital learning techniques and technologies. One of the remits of the program redevelopment project was to incorporate more blended learning, and well, in some ways COVID-19 did more to make that happen than I ever could have! We had roughly a week’s notice when the learning transitioned online and I worked in that week with ADD Jenny Underwood and Course Coordinators of Fashion and Textiles Materials, Sonya Kraan and Rebecca Van Amber to select the best online class platform for the school’s needs. Since then I and the other members of my team have done our best to help staff and students to get familiar and comfortable using Collaborate Ultra, and to think creatively about how they could solve some of the dilemmas posed by shifting heavily practical courses into the online space.
How do you think the school of fashion community has responded to teaching and learning online?
Amazingly!! The school as a whole, staff and students, have responded to the upheaval with what I can only describe as incredible grit, determination and bubbles. There’s been stress, there’s been tears, but I continue to be blown away by the level of must-do, can-do attitude, and the ability to find advantage in adversity. Must be that design mindset, it’s brought out the creativity in spades! I don’t need to elaborate on the creative ways the teachers have found to teach their courses online and keep their students engaged, you can read all about it in previous issues of the Wrap! I have and continue to be inspired and learn heaps from them.
What worked well and what can we keep for future online and digital learning? What could we change?
From my perspective, COVID19 has represented a unique, albeit stressful! opportunity for people to really understand what learning and teaching online entails. There is not a teacher or a student in this school now who isn’t familiar with the online environment and what it can and can’t do, and the next step for the school is to take what’s best about online, and combine it with what’s best about the other forms of learning (studio-based, workplace-based, lecture-based etc) to create new learning experiences, and to solve some of the more intransigent difficulties of the past.
One of the things I think staff are really coming to grips with is how to use the online space in 3 dimensions to provide the things that we all know to be essential to learning: personal interaction, reflective time and practice, physical space to work and experiment, different ways of engaging, and questioning how things are done.
Shifting online has made people think very carefully about how to structure learning times. We all worked out very quickly that 4 hour classes on screen were exhausting, and there is now a lot of work being done to rethink how that ‘teacher-guided’ time is designed. That mindset is something very transferable and I would love to see it applied to all the learning spaces we use, so they’re all used to their best advantage. Perhaps as a bonus we can also solve some of the more intransigent timetabling difficulties around shared studio and labs spaces.
One of the most intriguing elements of this whole caper for me, is how bringing the learning so actively into the students’ own personal space will affect their development over time. Especially for first years just beginning their learning journey with the school, how will the necessity of seeing and being creative with everyday objects in new ways, and the development of auxiliary skills that may not have otherwise have got as much attention (hand work, but also digital skills such as communicating online, development of digital resources to demonstrate learning and skill such as creative use of video and other media) impact on their creative and professional output over time.
One of the best things about online learning is that it can be a connecting and documenting force in that space. By being constantly at hand, it can encourage and capture new creative thought and immersion in the learning in a way that changes their world. That is working very well in this situation, and I would love to see that continue.
How have you found working from home?
I mostly love working from home. I love that my office now has a window, and I get to share my cats with my colleagues (maybe they don’t love it, but there’s lots of cat people in F&T!). I’ve noticed how productive we really can be when we’re all working online but some things have required some adjustment. I’m a big pointer at the screen, so I’ve had to make an effort to explain things in ways that are less vague and hand wavy, and more verbal. Also, as a person who is always on the move touching base with many people over the course of a day, I’ve noticed how much I am missing knowing the general background happenings and intel that I pick up on my perambulations.
Thank you, Emma!
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Congratulations to Professor Lijing Wang!
A project lead by Professor Lijing Wang from the School of Fashion and Textiles has been awarded $439,314 through Australia Research Council (ARC) funding. The project looks to improve multilayered firefighting protective garments and their thermal comfort.
It will create new multifunctional fabric designs and engineering techniques to integrate improved heat and flame protection, comfort and smart features into optimised multilayered garments. This will better protect wearers and allow them to effectively combat bushfires and save lives and assets.
Professor Lijing Wang said: “This project will provide substantial societal benefit to the Australian community by developing next generation protective clothing systems with improved performance and comfort to protect those who risk their lives to save properties and other people’s lives. The clothing systems could also be lifesaving personal protective equipment for civilians in bushfire prone areas or flash fire environment. The study will contribute to occupational health and community safety, and industrial capability development. The innovative material design and engineering technology developed through the project and the world-class researchers trained will be the foundation for Australian textile industry to advance its supply chain competitiveness and capture the fast growing business of protective clothing. The technologies and material engineering methods will enable Australian industry to access multibillion-dollar markets for multilayer protective garments with enabled sensors and other electronics in a manner that is sufficiently durable, reliable and ergonomic for the demanding eTextiles applications.”
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PRS: Online Edition
The first online Practice Research Symposium (PRS) was held on 5-8 June 2020. Congratulations to the candidates from the School of Fashion and Textiles who presented their research and achieved their milestones!
In her textile practice, Marni Stuart works to protect the native Queensland Wallum habitat for future generations, using botanical observation and documentation to help promote and protect native Australian habitats.
Through her practice research, Remie Cibis considers the relationship between the body and images, perceiving the garment as a representational-space. A psychoanalytic perspective informed by visual arts feminist critique informs her questions around what fashion-images do to bodies and what bodies can do to fashion-images. Also within the context of image-making, Nirma Madhoo asks how a praxis enabled by digital methodologies and tools such as Virtual Reality [VR] can be explored for performative fashion media contexts. Her practice research proposes understanding how the digital virtual shapes the performing fashion body and how the fashion body performs the digital virtual. While Gareth Kershaw explores material thinking through the practices of sculpture and dress, investigating the methodologies employed in the creation of clothing (pattern cutting & draping) and the processes of sculptural fabrication (casing, assembling, modelling and carving).
Investigating the processes and subjectivities of marginalisation, Fernanda Quilici Mola considers the contributions of traditional textile-craft activities to individuals and communities recognised as marginalised. Her research has found political and affective transformations take place through participating in traditional textile-craft practices, a phenomenon she describes as textile-poiesis. Similarly, Sang Thai explores the use of a men’s t-shirt within the intersections of gender, masculinity, performativity, race privilege, and the Asian queer experience in Australia. Strategies of parody and irony shape the t-shirt as a tool for subversive practice and empowerment in challenging hegemonic subjectivities.
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Waa Weelum
It is Chinnup, the season of cockatoos. Morning frosts, bleak mists and freezing winds make this the the coldest time of year. The Bunjil constellation returns in the night sky. Long cloaks were made from possum skins, and old people and pregnant women rubbed emu fat into the skin for protection from the cold. Possums have young in pouch, sugar gliders give birth, and echidnas are searching for mates. Roots of tubers are eaten.
In Melbourne and its surrounds, there are seven annual indigenous seasons alongside two non-annual seasons: flood and fire seasons. The Kulin people refer to the land as the ‘cold country’, which seems apt as we enter deep winter! While there have been recent sightings of the endangered black cockatoo in outer Melbourne suburbs, their presence is reminder of the loss of habitat due to the bushfires earlier this year.
In the next edition of the Houndstooth, we will look at the return to campus and check in with the plants and wildlife that call Waa Weelum home.
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