Towards a creative ID in fashion business education

IFFTI 2019

Paper 48

Jacqueline Shorrocks
& Anthony Kent

Nottingham Trent University

Towards a creative ID in fashion business education

This paper challenges the conventions of fashion business education and its ability to develop creative graduates. The place of creativity is not well established, but its need is: fashion business students need to have the opportunity to develop the ability and skills needed for creativity.

Teaching for creativity on fashion business courses focuses on knowledge acquisition and the development of visual communication skills. Although useful, these attributes reflect a limited view of creativity, and do not develop the creative thinking for idea generation and problem solving needed by fashion business graduates. Fashion business educators have an important role in students’ creative development. However, their individual experiences of creativity determine their personal identity of creativity and how they teach for creativity. Similarly, students have their own creative identities which may vary from those of their peers and teachers.

There is a lack of awareness of the multiple identities of creativity within the fashion business education community. Together, the university education systems, the personal creative identities of teachers and students, and the lack of knowledge and discourse about creativity, produces limited and accidental teaching for creativity.

This paper argues for recognition of these multiple IDs of creativity, and teaching that enables the development of the personal ID of creativity of each fashion business student, through the development of a community ID of teaching for creativity. How a new community of creative educators can be built is based on McWilliam’s theory of creative capacity building. This paper extends and challenges her theories by calling for a new model of creative fashion business education that challenges preconceptions about what and how fashion business students are taught. The paper concludes with a new creative ID for the community of fashion educators and students, created through teacher education and management support.

 

Jacqueline Anne Shorrocks

Jacqueline worked for over 15 years in the FMCG and retail industry in senior Buying and Merchandise management roles with fashion and non-fashion companies. After gaining an MBA she moved into Academia as a part time lecturer on the new fashion merchandising degree course at the University of Westminster. She soon took over the programme leader role and oversaw the course development and the addition of new courses to Westminster’s fashion business offering. She found she loved her new career: the student interaction, course development, industry liaison and learning more about the industry she had worked in. After three years as programme leader, she moved to Nottingham Trent to head up their new fashion management, marketing and communication department. She has recently returned from living and working in Singapore and completing a professional doctorate. Experiences in both industry and Academia sparked her interest in creativity and its teaching, particularly within a management context. The area of research for her PhD is teaching for creativity on fashion business courses and has informed the paper presented today.