In rural Appalachian communities of southeast Ohio, where generational poverty is high, communities and schools worked together to both create meaningful learning experiences and ensure that basic needs were met before students started the school year. Families of students who attended Summer Advantage--a 21-day summer school program for…

Fashion has a varied and explosive history. Our responsibility as educators preparing students and therefore careers for this context places us in a very difficult and complex position. Do we prepare students to be successful or do we prepare them to 'invest' in their industry? In this paper, we construct our story of developing an ethical,…

The author examined how low-income job seekers participating in a workplace dress program identified traditional business and business casual dress. Seventy low-income job seekers identified clothing items as traditional business (e.g., suits, ties), similar to identifications made by professionals and image consultants in previous literature.…

Clothing is an integral part of our lives, yet modes of producing, using, and disposing of apparel have significant impacts on the environment. Our research explored the role transformative learning plays in the transition to more sustainable thinking and actions about clothing to illuminate instrumental learning processes and examine the…

In this paper, I look into the papers of Fannia Cohn, an immigrant labour organizer, who served the Education Department of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) between 1918 and 1962 and became one of its few women vice-presidents. As an internationally recognized figure in the history of workers' education, Cohn left a rich…

This article examines the relationship between skill acquisition and the constitution of economic selfhood in Trinidad. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among garment workers in a context of industrial decline, I show how their formal, informal, and illicit means of acquiring sewing skills are inextricably linked to the fragmented and unstable…

The goal of this paper is to illustrate how the promotion of 21st Century process skills can be used to enhance student learning and workplace skill development: thinking, problem solving, collaboration, communication, leadership, and management. As an illustrative case, fashion merchandising and design students conducted research for a…

In August 1922 a young woman was writing a letter to her comrade and colleague in a New York garment shop. The sender was Rose Pesotta, writing from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where she had just completed a summer school for women workers. Short as it is, the letter brings together a cluster of themes, ideas, and practices that were…

In 2009, Andre Andrade was convicted for the murder of Angie Zapata, an 18-year-old Latina transgender woman living in rural Colorado. This essay traces the way Angie's friends, family, and community countered the assertion of transphobia in the courtroom and larger public discussion by circulating self-portraits of Angie on t-shirts at community…

In this conceptual piece, we examine media as a nexus of a traditional schooling pedagogy and performance pedagogy to make visible how their overlapping elements produce media's pervasive educative force but also to gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of using media in educational contexts. Nexus analysis examines a fashion makeover…

In postmodern scholarship there has been a temporal shift to thinking of the body as malleable rather than fixed, which has opened space for the remaking of the self via the remaking of the body (Featherstone, 1991; Giddens, 1991). Among men, this process is thought to interact with shifting understandings of masculinity. In this study, 14…

This article describes experiences of an adult educator (Kofi Quan-Baffour) at the University of South Africa, 1995 to 2009, teaching tutorial classes to train teachers who, in turn, would offer adult literacy classes/sessions (in relation to adult basic education and training [ABET] policies initiated post-1994). The article aims to make a…

As the world economy continues to evolve, businesses and industries must adopt new practices and processes in order to survive. Quality and cost control, work teams and participatory management, and an infusion of technology are transforming the way people work and do business. Employees are now expected to read, write, and communicate…

This essay reveals the importance of investigating mundane internal documents, particularly when considering muted rhetors, who may use such texts strategically in an attempt to subvert the status quo. It does so by examining the first and second women presidents of NCTE and their efforts to professionalize the organization and to strengthen the…

Makeover shows are ideal sites from which to examine mediated images of the individual and the cultural values imparted through program viewing. The author ventured to investigate the interpellation of viewers and the decoding of the messages and ideology of the television program "What Not to Wear" (WNTW), a popular weekly makeover program that…