 Now, can you please stand up if you're wearing something made in China? Our idea for an interdisciplinary teaching study came about through our work with the Faculty of Science Sustainability Network, where we get together and think of ideas we'd like to sort of generate around the university. And we came up with the idea of having a teaching case study that we can use across courses within the Faculty of Science and then building out to the wider university. I'm Nikki Harre and I work in a school of psychology and I am also the Associate Dean of Sustainability. The global clothing industry is a great topic because it's really relevant to young people. So every student sitting in the class is involved in this industry and also because it allows us to speak about it from so many disciplinary perspectives. Now, can you stand if you're wearing at least one garment made of something plastic related, like polyester, nylon, spandex, okay? We had to think of a model that would work within the university system as it is. They all watch the film The True Cost so that all the students have got something in common and then they have lectures in their primary discipline about that discipline's perspective on the global clothing industry and then they get together with students from the other class and they exchange, they give presentations and they have discussions on the topic and they're assessed on how much they learnt from the other students as well as having to do some kind of primary assignment in their home discipline. My name is Manuel Valle and I'm a lecturer at the University of Auckland. We educate them through the documentary but we also give them an opportunity to reflect on their own clothing purchases and what it means to them and all that and also to teach sociology concepts to the psychology students which is one of the great ways of learning. You can't really learn something deeply unless you can teach it to someone else. There's a really big emphasis in all the courses on communication. One aspect of that is writing. So in each of their home courses they have to do a written assignment that develops their skills in a particular form of writing and psychology for example is academic writing but also they have to do a presentation to their fellow students in the other discipline that teaches them how to communicate verbally, how to put together a visual presentation and the students are assessed on how well they've absorbed that knowledge that they've got from the students in the other course. My name is Penny Brothers and I'm a professor of chemistry in the School of Chemical Sciences. Part of the program that I teach is in Chem 260 which is a green chemistry course. We look at issues where chemistry interacts with clothing which you might at first naively think what's chemistry got to do with clothing but in fact all the materials that we wear have been through some kind of chemical process at some stage in their lifetime and so we've examined that chemistry and we've looked at ways in which that chemistry could be made greener, more sustainable, reduce toxic chemicals, more to do with the lifetime of the product so that we don't end up with as much material in a landfill. So I teach sociology 229 which is environmental sociology. The course covers the environmental problems setting our society as well as looking at some of the upstream causes of those problems. The core of the course is dedicated to building alternative societies so looking at potential solutions. I teach psychology 108, it's one of our introductory courses and in relation to the global clothing industry I teach them about why we're such big consumers in the west, the factors that drive that and I also teach them about why we're able to ignore the conditions of workers and the environmental impact of buying so many clothes. We do surveys of students at the end of the course and we're finding huge increases in their knowledge and concern about the social and environmental conditions and I recently ran into a couple of students that said since they did the course they've been unable to buy anything new because their consciousness of what goes into new clothes has been so strongly elevated by the course. The feedback from the students last year, the first year we ran the case study was really excellent. They felt challenged but they felt rewarded as well. They found that the topic was interesting because the topic was a little out of the purview of what they usually encounter in chemistry courses. I think there's definitely a future in this kind of teaching. We stay in our disciplinary silos too much and finding ways in which we can get students to interact with each other. That peer learning, peer sharing component is really important rather than mixing up the disciplines by having for example guest lectures from other teachers actually having the students do it has proved really valuable for us.