For our first workshop, we were asked to share something we’ve found about pedagogy. I have engaged with the photo essay The Jamdani Project: A journey of intergenerational and transnational learning by Dr Lipi Begum (2016). I thought useful to share my thoughts here to help me plan for my presentation. Here they are:

1. Why this photo essay?

• I was first drawn to this project as it has the word ‘transnational’ in its title and relates to fashion history. My key areas of interest!
• It’s also an outreach project involving students and transnational communities, something I’ve been hoping to do for a while. A couple of years ago I submitted an unsuccessful bid for funding from UAL Outreach for a Global Perspectives project (FHT Y2). Reading about a successful one may help me devise a new bid.

2. Working with history and objects (two Jamdani woven in Rupshi for the project):

• As a museum curator, my favourite aspect of the job was always to work with objects. Care for them, research them, exhibit them, use them to connect with audiences and spark dialogue.
• Museum objects can speak lengths if one only knows how to listen to them. Object-based research is very enriching and when the environment is right, the connection they can create with audiences is unsurpassed. Nevertheless, they have their own limitations in terms of handling/display due to conservation.
• Dress in museum collections are also deprived of their most important partner and meaning maker – the living body. As Elizabeth Wilson noted,

We experience a sense of the uncanny when we gaze at garments that had an intimate relationship with human beings long since gone to their graves. For clothes are so much part of our living, moving selves that, frozen on display in the mausoleums of culture, they hint at something only half understood, sinister, threatening; the atrophy of the body, and the evanescence of life.”

2003: 1

• The fact that the objects of study – two Jamdani fabrics – were woven for the project, enabled the students to thoroughly engage with them. No handling restrictions.
• And as they were used to produce two dresses, the relationship between material-design-body was also realised.

3. Making as learning:

• The students were asked to use the fabrics to design two Regency-inspired evening dresses, thus also learning about fashion history.
• This idea of making as learning, and specially as methodology for fashion history, was in the core of the AHRC-funded research project I was recently involved with. The premisse of Exploding Fashion: Cutting, Constructing and Thinking Through Things, was to select five dresses in museum collections around the world and recreate them in the studio in order to learn about their design processes. We then animated them digitally in order to reintroduce a moving body and further understand their designs and social/cultural context.
• Should I be introducing making in my fashion history lectures? Perhaps as the assessment for the module 20th Century Fashion Chronology, which needs rethinking…

4. Engagement with different media:

• In order to engage with the Regency period (the inspiration to their designs), the students were asked to read Jane Austen and study Regency-style dresses created as part of a project run by the Brick Lane Circle and Stepney Trust entitled ‘How villages and towns in Bengal dressed London ladies in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries’ (2013)
• Could the facsimile dresses be substituted by surviving examples in museums?
• I also had to read Jane Austen, Samuel Richardson and Charles Dickens when we were learning the late 18th- and early 19th-centuries (FHT at CSM). But all this contextual material was purely European.
• They also learned about the history of Jamdani fabric and Bengal culture. This is interesting, as South Asian textiles were incredibly popular at the time, but we tend to focus on how Europeans used these textiles and Eastern influences in their dress/interiors. Question such as how these textiles were made, what were their design influences, what was the impact of trade to the local communities, etc., are rarely considered.
• Many of these textiles were produced for export, thus incorporating imagery and techniques from both the producing and consuming cultures – what curator Amelia Peck calls the first truly international design (2013).

5. The use of traditional Bengali fabrics to produce Western inspired dresses:

• Is this an example of pluriversal design (Escobar, 2018)?
• I think this is a fantastic opportunity to discuss cultural appropriation and appreciation in a more meaningful way.

6. Commission for the project:

• Perhaps this is the element missing from my unsuccessful bid? I struggled to justify the gains to the partnering community.
• The engagement with local craftsmanship was not only enriching to the students’ learning experience but could also be seen as empowering to the local weavers.
• Also the engagement with living traditions (the craftsmanship is passed down from generation to generation and the fabrics are woven in handmade looms) enables such traditions to continue (Boyer, 2009; Blank & Howard, 2013).

7. Group work

• Collaborative project. It seems the whole group worked together to produced the two evening dresses, however the essay doesn’t make clear how the project’s practicalities. Were the students divided into subgroups? How were the tasks shared?
• Most of my teaching involves cross-pathway group projects, and it’s always a challenge to ensure equal engagement, especially when the groups are so large.
• Could I introduce a group assessment for Chronology?
• Feedback was in the form of crit, where the students and tutors would discuss the ideas together. Again, all the group projects I lead encompass a crit and I feel it creates a really productive environment for the students to receive feedback on their own projects but also to listen and critique each other. This is usually more successful with the FCP students, who are used to the crit format. Something to expand with FHT (rather than presentations)?

8. Presentation and celebration

• At the end of the project, the students presented their final dresses to friends, family and tutors in an event that also included a celebration of Bengali culture (snacks, performance and music, presentation on muslin).
• What is the impact on the students, in terms of engagement, validation and output, by having an associated event like this?
• Can we have an event at the end of every cross-pathway group project?

9. Photo essay:

• Why not? I love this format!
• What other ways can we use to share a multilayered project? Film, blog, app, zine…

Bibliography:

Begum, L. (2016) The Jamdani Project: A journey of intergenerational and transnational learning. Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal. [Online]. vol.1 (1) pp.22-33. Available from: https://sparkjournal.arts.ac.uk/index.php/spark/article/view/9 [Accessed 9 January 2022]

Blank, T. & Howard, R. (eds.) (2013) Tradition in the Twenty-First Century: Locating the Role of the Past in the Present. Logan: Utah State University Press.

Boyer, P. (2009) Tradition as Truth and Communication: A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Escobar, A. (2018) Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Durham: Duke University Press.

Peck, A. (ed.) (2013) Interwoven Globe: The worldwide textile trade, 1500-1800. London: Thames & Hudson.

O’Neill, A. (ed.) Exploding Fashion: Making, Unmaking, and Remaking 20th Century Fashion. Tielt: Lannoo Publishers.

Wilson, E. (2003) Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and modernity. London: I.B. Tauris.