What have you touched today... and what is its story?

Last month, Paula Zuccotti replied to a tweet that I sent a while back. It was about her photography project which documented all the objects that a number of different people touched during a 24 hour period.
From Paula's website:
What's the first thing we touch when we wake up?
How do our favourite things reveal our hopes and fears?
Can objects tell the story of our lives?

 
 Image: Paula Zuccotti

We have been using the book for a while now in our unit called 'The Geography of our Stuff'. This is taught during Year 8, and is a full term's unit taking around 13 weeks to complete. There is also an assessment at the end.
This draws on work on the GeographyPods website, developed by Matt Podbury, but starts with some ideas from reading I've done over the years, and includes a range of practical and we hope interesting activities which look at commodities, supply chains (including the blazer that the students all wear). I was fortunate to contact a colleague at a local school, which had been visited by the company and he sent me the supply chain details that they had provided him during a talk.

There's a healthy homage here to Ian Cook et al's award winning Follow the Things work too - I helped to create some of the resources a few years ago - if you go to the bottom right hand side of the main page, you can see a series of links including one saying CLASSROOM.



I've also since worked on some ideas for Eeva Kempainen's culture busting workshop guide.
I have also made use of the first fanzine created as part of Fashion Revolution's work, this has also included other provocations such as the Eight Storeys film on Vimeo, and the Two Euro T-Shirt experiment. These provoke interesting reactions from the students.
I was fortunate to be exposed to these ideas while teaching, and taking part in the Geographical Association's Young People's Geographies project, where I first met Ian Cook. This introduced me to ideas of supply chains, connections with other places, and trade justice. Ian's paper on the story of a papaya (back in 2004) was the start of his work which has led him to good places, including an award in this year's Royal Geographical Society awards.

Other key sources that I would draw attention to here are to:
- visit Osocio.com - social advertising campaigns / non-profit
- follow Follow the Things on Twitter or Facebook (where they share the latest ideas here)
- find out about the MOCC, which was a feature of the recent RGS conference.

There is a link here with Globalisation too, and the position of fashion companies.

Also, check out the 2nd edition of the Fashion Revolution fanzine, which is now available for pre-order. I use my copy of the 1st edition as a resource.

This has just scratched the surface of the resources that we have related to this topic.

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