Y9

Geography

Understanding fast fashion

The fashion industry is the second most polluting industry world-wide, with Australians being the second largest consumer of fabric and textiles per person in the world.

The focus of this lesson is to encourage students to adapt their knowledge of what they currently know about fashion production and consumption to incorporate an understanding of the impacts of the fast fashion phenomenon on the places that produce the raw materials, make the product, and receive the wastes at the end of its life.

During this lesson students will have the opportunity to:

  • develop an understanding of how people can change and impact on places through their choices, in this case, fast fashion
  • pose complex questions of significance designed to challenge and expand understandings of fast fashion issues
  • demonstrate a growing understanding of the ways in which production and consumption affect different places.

NOTE: This lesson contains two optional extension activities:

  • develop a peer survey and calculate the data collected
  • complete the jigsaw learning activity to help students digest the key messages from The True Cost film

Links to the Australian Curriculum:

  • The effects of the production and consumption of goods on places and environments throughout the world and including a country from North-East Asia (ACHGK068)
  • Develop geographically significant questions and plan an inquiry that identifies and applies appropriate geographical methodologies and concepts (ACHGS063)
  • Represent multi-variable data in a range of appropriate forms, for example scatter plots, tables, field sketches and annotated diagrams, with and without the use of digital and spatial technologies (ACHGS065)
  • Reflect on and evaluate findings of an inquiry to propose individual and collective action in response to a contemporary geographical challenge, taking account of environmental, economic, political and social considerations; and explain the predicted outcomes and consequences of their proposal (ACHGS071)