RECOMPOSE: An invitation to explore the pedagogical environment as a regenerative front-line

Fashion education urgently requires a radical overhaul to challenge the socially, economically and environmentally extractive paradigm of which Fashion is a constituent part. A regenerative Fashion ecosystem cannot be envisioned without challenging the existing cultural and economic narratives necessary to transform the discipline. A regenerative approach to developmental learning is therefore relevant in terms of the personal journey, professionalism of students and the evolution of their personal agency, their capacity to externally consider others (people and situations), from an ethics of empathy and care (Mountz et al. 2015). Challenging the dominant perspective of educator as knowledge provider and motivated to unearth how students might reimagine Fashion as a field of knowledge by creating spaces for student-led agency in the context of regeneration we developed Recompose: ‘from the city to the farm back to the city’, an experimental workshop series at the MA Fashion at the Royal College of Art. This shifted the focus from viewing the design education context merely as a site for 'designing things' to recognising the design learning environment as a critical factor when exploring ecologically centred educational practices. The workshops engaged students in a series of activities that aimed to ground the regeneration in sites of situated knowledge, through their own understanding of locality and through a visit to a regenerative hemp farm. A focus of the facilitation was in encouraging a learning environment that supported open discussion, reflection, and student-driven inquiry through experiential approaches. During Recompose we aimed to start a reformation of the cultural understanding of fashion with the students, as an entry point to reconstructing the system around it. This paper problematises prevailing fibre narratives in circular fashion design, asking, what happens when regenerative materials encounter unsustainable, non-regenerative systems? How does a direct engagement with an environment inform an understanding of the systemic conditions of fashion creation? As part of the learning experience, we travelled to Margent Farm in Cambridgeshire with seven Architecture students. Here we learned about the affordances of limitations and the approach taken by Paloma Gormley (Material Cultures) in designing the site using hemp grown at the farm. We posed questions to the students about the value of regeneration in their practice, the importance of local production, and the generosity of the land. How can these practices give more than what they take? The Recompose workshop was a valuable experiment in recontextualising regeneration for fashion education. What emerged was a reframing of the social environment of learning in a regenerative pedagogical context: what can that situated learning environment afford? What could it mean to be regenerative with each other and with the land?