Cutting our Fashion Footprint

Shopping, Dresses, Fashion, Clothing, Shopper, Clothes
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This page was inspired by a conversation on the Facebook group about how to raise awareness of the footprint of fast fashion, and how to make upcycling and reinventing cool with the kids. A lot of very interesting resources and suggestions were shared in the comments. Here are the links with brief descriptions.

Fashion Revolution – What is it? Here’s an extract from the mission statement on the About page:

“We want to unite people and organisations to work together towards radically changing the way our clothes are sourced, produced and consumed, so that our clothing is made in a safe, clean and fair way. We believe that collaborating across the whole value chain — from farmer to consumer — is the only way to transform the industry. Our mission is to bring everyone together to make that happen.”

What do they do and why is it relevant to the ELT classroom? Their website has an Educator tab where they share free educational materials.

Design a Fashion Revolution Week poster, play our Fashion Ethics Trump Card Game or try our Quiz — our worksheets and activities inspire students to be curious and find out more about the fashion industry. Our materials offer educators a great opportunity to explore the many issues within the fashion industry: such as globalisation, workers’ rights, supply chain transparency, material sourcing, global citizenship, sustainable development and ethical business practices.

Thanks to Laura Jane McWilliams for sharing.

This 6-minute video from TED Ed explains the process of making a t-shirt. It’s subtitled with a voice over and infographics. Easy to follow and quite hard-hitting. Thanks to Greg Goodmacher for sharing. Preview (opens in a new tab)

Two video-based lessons from the British Council Learn English Teens site, Who Made Your Clothes and The Two Euro T-shirt. Thanks to Jo Budden for sharing.

A National Geographic video on hidden water, How Your T-shirt Can Make a Difference, comes highly recommended by Kate Cory-Wright.

Jen Dobson suggests the following article, Rental Jeans and Recycled Swimsuits, as a basis for a jigsaw reading for teens, or an exam-reading type activity.

Which text says X ? Students on their phones choose their text and make questions to be jumbled up amongst the class.

ELT Footprinter Jemma Hillyer shared a link to this quiz: How dirty is your closet? and author, Sue Kay, took up the challenge to use it in a class with her students in Oxford. Sue shared this set of tailormade worksheets that you can download and use in your class. 

This page is still active, please feel free to add any more ideas or links, either in the comments or on the facebook group and we’ll add them to the list!

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