Group Project Showcase: Silkscreen for Change

In the Opal band, our 7th/8th grade band, our big project will be a Silkscreen for Change project where students will form groups around a world problem, research that problem deeper, then create a design for a t-shirt that will bring awareness to that issue, as well as raise some money for it.

How can we use fashion to bring attention to important issues?

Student each made a pitch for a specific problem to focus on, including climate change, international migration, mental health, sexism and gender inequality, & more.

In addition, Daphne (a former Brightoworks Collaborator) has been coming in to discuss migration issues with the students. The students have been taking these conversations as an opportunity to look deeper at the connections between migration and the textile industry.

Students engaged with this by doing a close reading of a fact sheet related to migrant labor and created summary slides for their assigned sections before sharing out. This fed into a writing assignment where students needed to use evidence to argue why a particular clothing company is a "good" or "bad" company based on their self-generated definition of "good" and "bad" -- for example, is a "good" company one that makes a lot of profit? Or is a company only "good" if their business practices are ethical?

Across the Middle School, all students have also been reading Fashionopolis, a book exploring the clothing industry. This group spent some time creating a timeline slideshow before taking notes on the topic together. The book is easy to read, but factually dense, so they are taking our time with it.

Meanwhile, we've also been working on learning how to sew in the Creative Lab. Students have learned the basics of threading the machine, loading bobbins, and changing stitch types, lengths, and widths. So far, everyone is working on a practice "napkin" where the main goal is to draw straight lines and follow them with the machine. Precision is going to matter when we start making real pieces of fashion!

Interwoven with the on-campus activities described here, the group has gone on three field trips. The Opal band students have had the opportunity to visit the Levi’s headquarters, Free Gold Watch, and most recently, State of Flux! The owner of State of Flux (small fashion design studio in the Mission) showed us how a smaller studio goes from concept to finished product.  What a gift to get to see fashion in action in our community.