Fashion at the Forefront
From an outsider’s perspective, Margo Barton, Principal Lecturer and Academic Leader for Fashion at Otago Polytechnic could be assumed to have it easy.
In charge of delivering one of the organisation’s most iconic, popular and increasingly internationally-recognised programmes it would be understandable for her team to be feeling reasonably comfortable in their work right now.
But, as it turns out, staying on top means constantly striving to keep their teaching and learning strategies on the cutting edge of fashion.
In 2007, Margo was awarded a prestigious New Zealand Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award for Sustained Excellence. Her nomination was made in recognition of her passion and dedication to her academic role, design and delivery of programmes and her contribution to raising Otago Polytechnic’s Bachelor of Design (Fashion) to the status it currently enjoys.
However while acknowledging the recognition was great, Margo does not view the $20,000 prize money as the most positive aspect of her success, (although it has allowed her to continue her research work and fund conference attendance for fellow staff members).
Instead, she has found the collegial relationships she’s been able to form with fellow prize-winners from the University of Otago to be a true benefit to her teaching design and practice.
In fact, some of their teaching and best-practice recommendations have inspired solutions to the ongoing challenges within her programme delivery.
“Our main goals are to make sure the Bachelor’s programme remains as industry relevant as possible and to ensure that students have their own voice” she explains.
“Our team is increasingly introducing integrated learning into the programme so that students understand the relevance of each subject to their final goals.
As a result, we’re seeing that students don’t have the problems they previously had at the end of Year Three where they hadn’t figured out how different aspects of design and creating a collection go together.”
“We are team-teaching the students, however now that there’s five in the senior teaching team we can be presenting many different methods of patternmaking for example.
We need to use a book to maintain consistent answers to student questions! But we also recognise that students need to understand that there is more than one way to skin a cat and the ability to keep learning.
Out in the industry they will need to learn new techniques and new styles – in fact in many cases they will need to learn older techniques and styles as well!
“We need to make sure assessments are written in ways that address student perspectives – it is easy for us as staff to write in academic language, but less easy for students to understand.
We must keep trying to put ourselves in the mind of a 19-21 year old and make sure all cultural perspectives are addressed. Our students bring a wealth of things with them to the table – age, ethnicity, educational background and so on.”
However, enabling students to find their own creative voice remains one of the primary goals of the programme, and for this reason, Margo is proud to say that Otago Polytechnic’s School of Fashion does not have a ‘house style’ (although she acknowledges that, living in Dunedin, the predominant fashion can be ‘all about black.’)
A recent assignment for all Year Three students was to write a magazine article set 20 years in the future, looking back at their own careers.
It soon emerged that for some students, the work experience they were choosing to undertake as part of their studies bore little resemblance to their true goals for the future.
With time on their side, the work placements were changed.
And it’s this focus on ensuring graduates can find success on their own terms that will ensure Margo and her team remain at the top of their field.