The educator - gatekeeper or enabler?

Students and educators are waking up to the social, cultural, political and environmental impacts of fashion. They aim to challenge the status quo, traditional practices, value systems in fashion and transcend the current capitalist paradigm. However there are often barriers (institutional and individual) that inhibit the agency of educators to, with their students, expand the fashion field. The aim of this workshop is to create a safe space for discussing barriers faced in teaching progressive fashion and approaches already created to overcome them. This workshop serves as a first step towards creating a shared practical toolset for enabling educational change. As a provocation, bell hook‘s chapter: Embracing Change - Teaching in a Multicultural World from her seminal book Teaching to Transgress - Education as the Practice of Freedom will be worked with. Sharing her teching and learning experiences she comes to very practical ideas for educational frameworks/pedagogy. Although her work is focussed on the multicultural classroom, There is a lot of parity in her reasons for pedagogical change, making her text relevant to teaching expanded fashion practice.