Teaching Strategies for Teaching the History of Fashion and Dress

AHA Session 95
Coordinating Council for Women in History 5
Friday, January 6, 2017: 10:30 AM-12:00 PM
Room 401 (Colorado Convention Center, Meeting Room Level)
Chair:
Eileen Boris, University of California, Santa Barbara
This session will function an open discussion and workshop, with each session member briefly outlining central pedagogical challenges and approaches which she herself has used in teaching fashion and dress in global contexts in the classroom. The audience will be encouraged to offer their own pedagogical strategies, and share and discuss syllabi and assignments with one another.
Papers:
Overcoming Obstacles in the Study of Historical Costume
Patricia Dillon, New York University
Using Social Media and Blogging in the Fashion History Classroom
Holly M. Kent, University of Illinois at Springfield
Using the Present to Illuminate the Past: Popular Culture’s Self-Referentiality as a Tool for Reexamining Fashion History
Anya Kurennaya, Parsons School of Design, The New School
Talking about Cultural Appropriation of Indigenous Fashion in the Classroom
Amanda Sikarskie, University of Michigan–Dearborn

Session Abstract

This roundtable explores the teaching of the history of fashion and dress in different regions, paying particular attention to how nationality, class, race, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation impact the study of these issues in the college classroom, as well as within scholarship itself.  The panel addresses the theme of scale by moving from the intimate to the global through a focus on one material culture sector. Questions include, but are not limited to, how can historians most effectively teach fashion and dress in their courses in terms of assignments, pedagogical strategies, and links to standard periodization and topics as a separate course and as part of other offerings? How can historians most productively situate their considerations of fashion in a global context? What challenges and difficulties arise in the teaching of the histories of fashion and dress, and how can we as educators most usefully address these challenges?

After brief presentations, the session will function as a workshop, with audience members encouraged to offer their own pedagogical strategies and share and discuss syllabi and assignments with one another.  Depending on size, we will break into small groups to come up with a teaching strategy or a conceptual approach to share with the entire group. Each presenter would lead a group.

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