Fashion is not so important after all !...? Fashion behaviour and subjective fashion theories of fourth-grade primary school pupils - implications for textiles lessons

The terms fashion and clothing characterise a central content and learning area of textiles lessons.

Based on the premise that questions about the 'right' or 'wrong' outfit, about the possession of or lack of 'valuable' vestimentary status symbols are already of (great) relevance for primary school pupils, and that fashion and clothing can be important but also potentially 'conflictual' topics for them, it seems sensible and necessary to integrate this learning area into textiles lessons as early as primary school.

In order to be able to work on such a complex and personally significant topic as 'fashion and clothing' with relatively young pupils in a meaningful, theoretically challenging and pupil-orientated way within primary school textiles lessons, it is helpful to be able to make appropriate content-related and didactic decisions in the knowledge of the pupils' existing prior knowledge, subjective ideas, interests and perspectives on the subject matter.

Based on these basic assumptions, the focus of the planned qualitatively orientated empirical study is on the collection and investigation of subjective ideas, concepts and constructions of meaning that primary school pupils in fourth grade(can) develop with regard to the topic of 'fashion and clothing'.

As the topics of fashion behaviour and subjective fashion theories of children have hardly been investigated from both a didactic and specialised perspective, an open, multi-step methodological design was developed for the study, whose closely interwoven components (observation, conducting role plays as an extended observation procedure, conducting guided individual interviews) are intended to open up a variety of perspectives on the object of investigation.

The pupils' ideas collected will be evaluated by means of a qualitative data analysis and compared with the results of the specialised clarification of the corresponding specialised and didactic concepts and ideas. Both research components are related to each other with the intention of teaching and form the basis for the development of a didactic structure for the learning field 'Fashion and Clothing' in close interdependence. Within the didactic structure, teaching guidelines and specific didactic tips and starting points are to be developed which show how the subject matter can be addressed within a technically and methodologically demanding, pupil-orientated, interdisciplinary textiles lesson in primary school.