As soon as I learned that we would be conducting a microteaching session, I was very much looking forward to it. The reason for this is largely based on some internal questions that I have been considering, regarding my teaching practice. While I view the micro teaching session as an opportunity to experiment with my approach to potentially working on these questions in class, at some future point.
To shed some context in this area, I want to introduce the importance and relevance of clothing as an integral part of my teaching practice. I work at London College of Fashion, so of course clothing is a central aspect to the teaching here. Furthermore, I work on the Fashion, Styling and Production course. As a course, we encourage our students to use clothing as the primary mode of expression, of communication and storytelling, in the projects that they work on.
I am interested in the emotive qualities of clothing, of clothing as a vehicle to communicate not just how we wish to look, be that style, trend, identity with a ‘tribe’, but to communicate how we feel, and how clothing can expand on this emotive aspect. In turn, I am very much interested in empathy; can clothing, by way of its emotive connotations, be used to trigger empathy? And in doing so, can it connect people who may not share the same experiences, but can nevertheless empathise?
A key text is the book Stuff, by Anthropologist, Daniel Miller. The text is important because it highlights the inconsistencies in the widely held presumption, from a Western/Eurocentric perspective, of clothing’s ability to only reveal the ‘surface’ – and in doing so, to be inherently superficial. Miller highlights that in many cultures, what and how people wear clothes, is in fact a highly nuanced language that describes how they feel, as part of a particular group within society. According to Miller “Clothes are our most personal possessions. They are the main medium between our sense of our bodies and our sense of the external world” (Miller, 2010, p. 23).
One frustration I have with the typical (Western) approach to clothing in many student interactions, is that the interaction stops short of the emotions. Miller states “After all, the aim of anthropology is understanding, in the sense of empathy” (Miller, 2010, p. 22). Therefore, I want the micro-teaching to be part influenced by ethnography, a branch of Anthropology. While I recently re-watched the documentary, Paris is Burning. (Paris is Burning, 1990) In this, the protagonists discuss how, when performing to an audience, they use clothing to communicate how it might feel to be a rich, white American, with career prospects and unlimited opportunity, while they have none. So, they are using clothing as a form of empathy, while at the same time, highlighting the glaring lack of equal opportunities to black and Latin American communities in 1980’s America.
So, in the microteaching session, I would like to explore clothing, as a path to observation and empathy.
References:
Miller, D. 2010. Stuff. Polity Press.
Livingston, J. 1990. Paris is Burning. Off-White Productions.