Teaching Sustainable Fashion

Your closet isn’t just personal style, it’s a supply chain, a set of climate impacts, and a story about how we learn to consume. We sit down with Dara Gellman, Youth Education Program Leader at Fashion Takes Action, to talk about sustainable fashion in schools and why fashion literacy belongs in family studies, home economics, and beyond. If you’ve ever wanted to teach fast fashion, textile waste, and climate change without making students feel judged for what they wear, this conversation gives you a clear, student-centred path forward. 

We dig into how Fashion Takes Action supports educators with ready-to-use lesson plans, unit plans, and workshops through their My Clothes, My World program, designed so teachers don’t need to be sustainability experts to get started. Dara shares how she frames the topic around empowerment instead of blame, including the reality that many young people have limited control over what they buy or wear. We also unpack what hopeful action looks like in the classroom, from caring for clothes longer and swapping to building a culture of collective change. 

If you are interested in learning  more consider signing up for OFSHEEA' and FTA's workshop - Fashion, Sustainability & Your Classroom on May 12, 2026 at 7pm.    Registration information can be found here https://forms.gle/Hey6UpkD2LfZkZwG6 

For more information about Fashion Takes Action and the work they do in classroom check out their website at  https://www.fashiontakesaction.com/

Subscribe for more practical conversations for educators, share this episode with a colleague, and leave a review so more teachers across Canada can find these sustainable fashion teaching ideas.

Be sure to like and follow this podcast on your favourite podcast platform. 

Follow OFSHEEA on social media 
IG @OFSHEEA
Facebook @Ontario Family Studies Home Economics Educators' Association
Email at ofsheea@ofsheea.ca 

Transcript

Why Fashion Belongs In Class

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Welcome back to another episode of What the Family Studies, the podcast where we explore big ideas in family studies education and spotlight the amazing organizations helping us inspire our students. I'm your host, Catherine Murphy, and today we're diving into the world of sustainable fashion, what it means, why it matters, and how we can teach it in a way that empowers rather than shames. I'm thrilled to be joined by Dara Gellman from Fashion Takes Action, an organization doing incredible work bringing sustainability education into our classrooms across Canada and the world. Dara leads school programming that helps young people understand the environmental impact of fashion and how small changes in their habits can make a big difference. Thanks so much for joining us tonight, Dara.

SPEAKER_02 0:51

Thank you so much for having me. This is a real pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

Well, Dara, to get us started, can you maybe tell us just a little bit about yourself, maybe your background and how you got into your role at Fashion Takes Action and what that role is right now?

SPEAKER_02 1:06

Sure, I'd love to. So I'll just start by explaining what my role is because it's the simpler of the two answers. So I am the youth education program leader at Fashion Takes Action. So essentially I'm running the youth education program at our organization, where, as you so adeptly described, we are engaging students and educators around issues of sustainable fashion. In terms of my background, I have a bit of a sort of multifaceted background. I've been teaching for about 20 years. I taught in public and independent schools across the Toronto area, and my focus was really in the arts and STEM and STEAM and interdisciplinary studies, and I always tried to get a sustainability focus in there. Alongside my teaching practice, I'm also a practicing visual artist and I write about food and food culture, and I'm also a dedicated home sewist. So when the role at Fashion Takes Action came up a couple of years ago, I had actually left the classroom after teaching for a really long time and felt that I needed a change, but still really invested in education, and this seemed to bring so many aspects of my background together. So I was really excited to move more clearly into the direction of sustainability education.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

It sounds to me like you are the consummate family studies teacher with everything that you just mentioned there, the fashion, the food, every aspect of it of what we teach. Can you describe to us what exactly is fashion takes action and how does your organization support schools and teachers in bringing sustainability and fashion literacy into the classroom?

SPEAKER_02 2:50

I I would love to answer that question, but I actually realized I forgot to say something in my prior answer about my background has to do with uh home ec teachers that actually I learned to sew by the sort of interference of a home egg teacher. I wasn't in home ec and I was trying to teach myself how to make a garment for a school play. And this amazing home ec teacher saw me struggling to like basically make up a pattern because I didn't even know that patterns existed. And she took me under her wing and she taught me how to use a pattern, how to sew, even though I wasn't in her class. And she started a lifelong interest in uh sewing and fashion and just sort of creative making. And that led to me doing a co-op position with an independent fashion designer when I was still in high school. So even though I didn't really end up working in the fashion industry per se, my very early experiences in high school with a home ec teacher, and then that led to sort of my first jobs initially with a fashion designer really made a huge impression on me. So I just wanted to give a shout out to uh home ec teachers and how they sometimes catch students doing things that they need help with. And in my case, I was really grateful for that.

What Fashion Takes Action Does

SPEAKER_01 4:07

That is a wonderful story. And I'm sure I mean, whoever that home ec teacher is, I'm sure they're so super proud of you and and and how you've you've turned out. That's amazing. So fashion takes action. I mean, it leads right into everything that you just said with us in our family studies courses. So can you tell us a little bit about it? I'd love to.

SPEAKER_02 4:26

Fashion Takes Action is an organization that advocates to remove barriers around sustainable fashion at multiple levels. So we're working in our whole organization with different kinds of audiences, I guess you could say. So we're working with citizens as a broad category, educators, students, and we're also working in the industry. So while I focus in my role specifically on youth education, we're trying to reach audiences across that entire spectrum of society. So the reason why we've connected uh fashion and sustainability, at least in you know the way that I understand it and practice it in my role, is that fashion is an accessible way to talk about sustainability and climate change and the environment because everybody gets dressed every day. So even people who aren't interested in clothing still have to choose it and wear it. And then, of course, lots of people are really interested in the various aspects of clothing in terms of self-expression, etc. So it's a really great way to start to engage individuals in conversations about climate change. So, in a way, we are an organization that focuses on fashion, but the underlying or really the overarching theme is sustainability, and that relates to everything from climate change to biodiversity to greenhouse gases and everything in between. So, our youth education program is called My Clothes, My World. And what we do is work to provide educators with materials that can help them connect these dots in their classroom. So we're creating ready-to-use lesson plans and unit plans, and our key approach in that is that you don't need background knowledge so that you can really use these materials and just get right into it. We also do in-person workshops, so we facilitate workshops in the geographic area that we can get to personally, and then also we do partnerships with other organizations, both in Canada and overseas, to try and spread those learning experiences where we can't physically go. To date, we've reached about 45,000 students in counting. And it might be of interest to note to the educators that are in the Toronto District School Board area that we are an approved presenter. So we're able to come into TDSB schools, but also we work in other boards and of course with independent and private schools as well, and sometimes in other kinds of settings and organizations. So we really try and go wherever we can find a way to get in.

Teaching Without Blame Or Shame

SPEAKER_01 7:03

I think what a wonderful, what a wonderful thing you're doing, because I think sometimes we think of fashion and we think just it's very superficial, but it's absolutely not. And you're coming in and you're teaching kids, you know, getting getting in and digging down deep into some of the important aspects of fashion. And you're right, we all do make that decision every day of what we're gonna put on our bodies, but you know, how we can do it in a sustainable way in a way that that's good for a planet. I think it it's great. But it it can be a sensitive topic for some kids, especially, you know, we have kids who are are mostly buying their clothing, probably I would imagine, from affordable retailers. So how do you uh approach the topic in a way that avoids, you know, shaming kids or and instead empowering them?

SPEAKER_02 7:45

I think that's such a great question, and I love that you ask that because it is a sensitive topic. You know, fashion um has really has a lot attached to it, uh, socioeconomic factors, uh social status, and you know, the older learners become, the more they become aware of what those clothing choices might mean or signify, or not mean or not signify. So it is something that we're really aware of and we take a lot of effort to think about and also to sort of touch base with the teachers that we work with, either in our printed materials that that we provide, our curriculum guides, or when we're doing workshops to kind of lay the groundwork. So when we're working in person in facilitated workshops, we're really explicitly talking to students about the idea that this is not about blame, that everybody who wears clothes is caught up in the same system that we did not explicitly set out to create. So everybody, including myself as somebody who works at this organization or someone who's facilitating, I'm probably wearing some of my, I know I'm wearing clothes that are representative of environmental and social harm because it's really hard to not. And really the way that we're looking at it is that we all have to take collective action over time to shift sort of social norms and cultural norms around how much clothing we buy, what we do with waste clothing, and how clothing is made. And that can happen at many different levels, but that no one individual is to blame, no one particular retailer is especially to blame in the sense that there's enough negative consequences being caused by retailers of every kind. So it's not just brand A and not brand B. And that the more we become aware, the more we can be empowered to make different choices. And also acknowledging that a lot of people don't have choices about their clothing. So, especially young people on the younger end of the age range that we work with may not have any choice for a variety of factors in what they buy or what they wear. They may not even have that choice if they're at the upper end of the age spectrum. So we're really acknowledging that and saying that this is really about empowerment and knowledge, that there is no perfect sustainable fashion buyer or wearer of clothing, and that we can we can't do everything, but we can do a little something, we can become aware and we can start to take some tangible, doable actions that can help us to deal with the issues of fashion overconsumption and fashion waste in particular. And we talk about, uh we can talk a bit more about that, but something like the seven R strategies, which empowers students and individuals in general across society to think about how do I deal with this issue that isn't just about what I spend or what I buy. There's a lot we can do that has nothing to do with that.

Grade 9 Vs Grade 12 Learning

SPEAKER_01 10:48

I think it's important what you said too, those, you know, when we were doing those small, tangible, doable actions, when a whole bunch of us are doing those little things, it can lead up to a really big difference. And I think that's important for kids, and it does empower power those students in in that way. So that's amazing. Um, the lessons in the workshops that you do, you you deal with a younger group of kids and you deal with some older ones as well, too. So for most of us in OffShia, we're high school students or high school teachers, sorry. Yes. Um so how do your workshops differ in in those grade nine students and those grade 12 students? So do you do you consider any any shifts in approach or any depth or anything like that when you're looking at the different grades?

SPEAKER_02 11:26

I absolutely would love to address that. I think one thing I want to say is also I'd like I'd like to sort of, I think maybe I skipped this earlier, but I I want to just mention that um part of what we do is supporting teachers as well. So we understand, and because I myself was in a classroom for about 20 odd years and in a variety of different contexts from after-school programs to public schools to uh independent schools, we totally get that climate issues, sustainability issues, environmental issues can be a really big lift for teachers out that if that content is outside of their expertise. We also have done a lot of looking into the research that shows that there's a really high interest in sustainability topics, but there can be really low uptake due to barriers, pressures, and requirements to kind of get that content into the classroom. So part of what we're doing is really trying to support the teachers so that they don't have to do their own research or prep. And part of what we're doing is thinking about how we can best engage students at different age levels. So we absolutely work with high school students. And I think what I could say first is what ties all of those grades together from nine through 12 are a few things. One which is really important to me is talking to students about kind of circles or spheres of influence. So the idea that the student is kind of really powerful and at the center of a set of relationships where they are being impacted by these various spheres, but they themselves can impact in turn themselves, their peers, their school, their family, and their various communities. So it's really coming from a place of empowerment and showing that the student is centered in this sort of powerful relationship across these circles of influence. We really see that students of all grade levels are really smart and capable. And even if they don't know much about the content, once you start to talk about what's going on, they're pretty quick to understand how they might get involved or what the issues might be. So it's really just frankly awesome and empowering myself as an educator to see that happen, you know, those ripples happen in the classroom. And also, I think this is really important that while we are giving clear information about sort of the negative impacts of the industry on the environment and the social impacts, our overall focus is that we want to lead to tangible, positive, and hopeful action. So a lot of people, including myself as a person who reads the news, can kind of get stuck in doom and gloom. But it's really important to take that narrative further. So that's the thing I would start to say about what ties it together. And then in terms of what's different, for me, the younger students at grade nine, you know, kind of levels, we're we're we're seeing them as, you know, they're actively forming their identity through how they interact with clothing and their peer groups. So we're trying to meet them there in a kind of gentle way. We know that they're in the earlier stages of abstract thinking, so concrete and visual examples really land well or better. So when we show pictures or, you know, really chart out the journey of a garment from, let's say, the cotton that was grown to where it ends up at the end of its life, that can really have a strong impact. I think that grade nine students, uh, their actions tend to be kind of more personal and immediate in tone. So they're interested in like swapping and thrifting and caring for clothes longer and taking part in school initiatives, and that they also need sometimes more scaffolding to kind of sit with those more difficult realities when we learn about things like garment worker conditions or um, you know, waste colonialism. We want to handle that gently so that the students still stay open so that they can move into the solution engineering kind of phase.

SPEAKER_01 15:34

That's amazing what you're doing with the grade nine students. I think it's fantastic because they are though those younger kids. We are just starting to work with them a little bit. And then the grade 12s, what are you what are you doing differently with those students?

SPEAKER_02 15:46

I think that by grade 12, students have had more experiences of autonomy. So they've had more experience in in life with different levels of society. So they might have had interactions with like in institutions of different kinds and businesses of different kinds. They have potentially had some purchasing power. Maybe they've earned their own money. So they're positioned in a different way to kind of understand those different levels of function in society and potentially reflect more critically on, for example, why they buy what they buy, because they've had more exposure to marketing, social media influences, they've seen different, you know, layers of trend cycles happen, let's say throughout the duration of their high school years. Um, I think that grade 12s can really handle systems thinking. So we're talking about, you know, the ideas of supply chains, the idea of economics that take place between countries, um, and even things to do with how policies do or don't work. And one of the things that I love to talk about actually with a variety of grades, but especially the older grades, is the Montreal protocol and looking at how the entire world essentially was able to work together to handle the issue of uh CFCs degrading the ozone layer. So I love to introduce this idea that we have successfully solved a climate and environmental crisis before. And if we kind of um, you know, take that apart and look at all who all the stakeholders were in that, that's something I really enjoy talking about with older students because they can identify all of those different stakeholders and start to think about where they fit in that or where government fits. I think that older students can, of course, think a little bit more in a complex way about sort of the ambiguity of morals and ethics, and um that they can also do that immediate kind of personal action, but they also might be more interested in advocacy or bigger pieces of research or doing advocacy uh actions like writing to a brand or a government representative, or maybe they're starting to think about career paths. Um, and of course, there's the media literacy piece, which uh all grades can engage with, but I think that older students, because they've had more exposure and more time to be exposed, might have a little bit more of an ability to do a deeper critical analysis around things like greenwashing or influencer culture and you know, um other topics related to that.

Cross-Curricular Links That Work

SPEAKER_01 18:29

I think that's amazing. Like you have just done so much. It it almost leads into my, well, it certainly does lead well into my next question of cross-curricular collaboration. So, what opportunities exist for us as family studies teachers? And so, how can we work with other departments to expand sustainability learning?

SPEAKER_02 18:45

I love that question, and that's a total tongue twister, but it's way easier to collaborate than it is to say that tongue twister. So for me, the answer to that is a big all caps exclamation mark. Yes, this is the perfect opportunity to work with other subjects to do interdisciplinary or cross-curricular work and to collaborate. So this is a thematic that's very near and dear to me because I have worked in many interdisciplinary settings and I've just grown so much by doing projects with other educators. So doing something like working between math and the visual arts, for example, or science and the arts, or any other kind of combination that you could think of that might be slightly unlikely, but of course, because of STEM and STEAM, we hopefully have some more of those things happening. The great thing about sustainability learning and education is that I think it naturally breaks down subject silos. And the way that I would position that is, you know, we used to think, and we being sort of just the diffuse we of culture, that if we gave people the facts, scientific facts, pure data that about the environment and about what is not going right, what's going wrong, that would lead to behavior change. And I think most people are pretty much in agreement that just communicating the pure science and the data has not driven fast enough behavior change, and that we need to look at it from many other viewpoints and mindsets. And so there's so many ways that we can do that in sustainability. So, for example, if you think about, I'm thinking about all the studies that I've read about many aspects to do with sustainability learning. There's a lot of math and a lot of statistics involved in sustainability learning. So it's the perfect way to involve math and science because you can look at everything from how much waste is generated in a community, how much textile waste to uh water usage, uh you name it, you could really take that in a really interesting direction. Of course, geography and social studies really plays a role because you're looking at socioeconomic factors, you're looking at where certain types of activities are happening. Um, so for example, we've got the issue of waste colonialism where fashion waste specifically is being shipped to other countries where it wasn't produced. So we have, if you've heard of the great uh fashion garbage dump in the Atacama Desert in Chile and South America, uh that's fashion that's being shipped from around the world to a desert in Chile to be dumped and left. Um, you've also got fashion waste being shipped to uh Acra Ghana, which is home to Cantamanto Market, the uh one of the world's, if not the world's, largest secondhand uh markets for used clothing. So just in those two uh geographic locations alone, you've got a wealth of things to dive into. In terms of technology, there's a lot of Really interesting next generation materials being developed right now. Everything from leather alternatives made out of mushrooms or mycelium, all sorts of products made out of agricultural waste. We've got, of course, uh recycled wool, recycled cotton, recycled polyester, and then we've got the technologies themselves where we're uh various sectors of the industry are looking at how to recycle different types of products, which is a very complicated undertaking. Of course, we have the arts, which is very close to my heart. So we have everything from artists like Brian Youngin, who is an indigenous Canadian artist who's repurposing fashion accessories into these incredible sculptural works. And then we have textile designers from Cantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana, who are putting on festivals of incredible designs made entirely out of secondhand fashion from that uh world's largest secondhand clothing market. So there's so many projects that you could do in there looking at fashion and sustainability through artistic expression. And then of course there's social justice issues. So everything from the impacts on women and girls in the fashion industry, women are make up about 80% of uh up to 80% of the global fashion worker workforce. So that's in the high, I think 70 million, if my numbers are correct. And then we've got the issue of waste colonialism, landfill, you name it. So many ways to get to the content of what's happening with fashion production, what's happening with fashion waste, what are the impacts on our environment and our societies through these different subject lenses.

Waste Colonialism And Real-World Examples

SPEAKER_01 23:50

Dara, it's amazing. You you just, you know, you tweaked my brain a little bit here because I have a memory of teaching grade nine geography many, many years ago when I first started teaching. And we used to do an activity called look at the label, and it was just to kind of get students, you know, looking at where their clothing came from and and having them think about, you know, who's who's making their clothing. Um and it was a really great little activity for our grade nine geography students. But I can I can see so much of what you were saying happening in our schools and in our curriculum, and I think it's it's amazing. Um, what programs does Fashion Take Action uh currently offer? And and are any new initiatives coming that we as family studies educators might want to know about?

SPEAKER_02 24:33

Absolutely. So we offer our curriculum guides our units, so units are multiple lessons connected together by a specific thematic. So we offer those through our website. Uh, we also offer facilitated in-person workshops for students. And I will also mention that we also do professional development activities for adults and for educators. So we do that in a variety of contexts. So we were really lucky to be uh invited to the annual kind of eco schools kickoff the last couple of years where we uh spoke with and worked with up about 60 teachers each time to sort of introduce them to this content so that they could be aware themselves, they could see what might be possible to bring into their own classrooms and of course let them know what we offer. And so uh educators are more than welcome to get in touch with us at any time if they're interested in booking a workshop. Uh, something that we're really excited about is a new project that we have upcoming later this in this fall, I would say, is we are developing an online learning environment where our learning materials geared towards teachers will be available online in a kind of digital interactive format. So traditionally, um we've been offering PDF lesson plans like many teachers will be used to, but we are building these and though that will still be available, but we are working on a platform where we'll be able to provide some interactive elements for the teacher to use in their classroom. So it's still geared towards teachers to help them do this teaching in their classroom. And again, we're giving as much information as we can to educators so that they don't have to do their own research or prep. So we're probably giving them maybe even more information than they might need, but it's there so that the teachers that are interested in various bits of uh prepping themselves can take what they want. And then, of course, it's a fully fleshed out learning experience with all sorts of resources and links so that the teacher can extend the learning if their class is interested. And when we do in-person workshops, we also provide a follow-up document so that teachers know how to keep it going if they andor their classes are interested. But this online learning environment is something that's new for us and we're really excited about it. We're developing new curriculum areas. So we will be doing an entire unit on the issue of greenwashing. So that is when companies are making sustainability claims that aren't necessarily accurate or truthful, and we're trying to help individuals, students specifically understand what to look for when they're assessing the sustainability claims of fashion items in particular. We're going to be doing another unit. I'm really excited about this one, about the psychology behind fashion overconsumption. So we're working with an expert who's helping us to build a curriculum to educate students about how the marketing techniques that are used on social media are pushing the right buttons to get us to purchase, even if we don't really need something, or if we're purchasing at a time when we're especially vulnerable. And we're going to be developing a toolkit out of that, a kind of thinking routine to help anyone think about whether they need to purchase something in that moment, because the less we purchase, the better off we all are. And we'll be doing a curriculum that connects biodiversity and the impacts of fashion on biodiversity. And I'm really excited to say that we're working with some Indigenous educators to do some new content that connects sustainability worldviews with uh indigenous ways of thinking so that we can really expand the ways in which, in a mainstream way, we talk about sustainability, but often that doesn't bring in Indigenous worldviews and ways of knowing. And that's really critical. So we're taking the direction of making sure that we attend to that because that's our responsibility as educators to make sure that we don't leave that behind. So we've got a lot of new content coming. It's still some months away, but into the new school year of 26-27, we'll have that material available online.

New Resources Plus PD Plug

SPEAKER_01 29:02

That is amazing. You've just mentioned so many things. I was actually like taking little notes here about some of the things that I wanted to implementing into my classrooms coming next year, come the fall. So that's fantastic. I really appreciate that. And I think I can speak for most teachers when I say good resources and good PD, we love them. We can't get enough of it. So definitely Yeah, we want to keep track on this and we want to definitely keep in touch with you for sure. Um, Dora, thank you so much for joining us tonight and sharing the important work that Fashion Takes Action is doing.

SPEAKER_02 29:32

Thank you so much. And I would be remiss, I really loved your fantastic questions, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention, it's right here in my notes, um, that we're actually going to be doing a professional development workshop for members of Off Shia. And I think non-members can attend as well. And we're going to be talking about, well, the topic is called solving fashion's waste problems. So we're going to be talking about the scale of overconsumption, production, and waste in the fashion industry. We're going to be looking at some of those impacts to familiarize teachers that may not know about that. We're also going to touch on specific course codes and curriculum connection expectations. So we could really hone in for some teachers if that's helpful to help them see where they could connect this content to what they need to be doing in their classrooms and highlight some tangible, hopeful activities for students. And overall, we just want to be able to answer any questions and chat with educators to help them feel more familiar with the material and do whatever we can to support and empower educators to bring this content into their classroom in a way that suits their context. So that's a little plug for that upcoming PD workshop. And I believe it's happening on May 12th at 7 p.m. online.

SPEAKER_01 30:48

That's wonderful. Thank you so much for giving us that plug. I really appreciate that.

SPEAKER_02 30:53

I'm really excited to do the workshop.

SPEAKER_01 30:56

And Derek, you know, thanks so much for the work that you do to support educators and to support students and to help us to rethink our relationship with clothing and the environment. I think it's really important in the world that we live in today. So it's much appreciated for sure.

SPEAKER_02 31:10

Well, thank you so much. And, you know, going back to the story that I told at the beginning of the podcast, that, you know, a home ec teacher really made a serious impact on me as a person in so many ways. And so my hat's off to all the educators out there who are doing this work that maybe you're not getting the props that you should in the moment when you're do making these efforts, but that it really does make an impact on young people's lives. And those young people turn into adults who then remember those teachers. So thank you so much for the work that you're doing and to the whole community. And we really look forward as an organization to interacting with the community more deeply as time goes on. And for us, this is a really great first step towards that.

SPEAKER_01 31:56

That is absolutely wonderful. We love those stories. They're great. And for our listeners, if you'd like to bring Fashion Takes Action programming into your classroom or explore their resources, check out fashiontakesaction.com. Check out the show notes for more information. And remember, next month we'll be talking to Jessica Moorehouse, best-selling author of Everything But Money: The Hidden Barriers Between You and Financial Freedom. And as always, thank you for tuning in to What the Family Studies. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a colleague, subscribe, and keep the conversation going in your school community. And until then, keep inspiring learners to think critically, live sustainably, and care deeply.

SPEAKER_00 32:34

What the Family Studies is brought to you by the Ontario Family Studies Home Economics Educators Association. Special thanks to our producer, Michelin Galant, editor Charlie Rogers, and our host, Catherine Murphy.