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The purpose of this paper is to provide secondary social studies practitioners with a research-based adaptable lesson plan aligned with the National Council for the Social Studies Thematic Strands and its C3 Framework incorporating the digitized collection of the National Gallery of Art and Visual Thinking Strategies to foster historical understanding through a student-driven process of online gallery curation.

The author describes the connections between constructivist learning and technology integration in the classroom, linking technological, visual, and social studies literacy. The internet mediates student experience. It is both text-based and image-saturated; therefore, it is important for students to develop fluency with the written word and visual literacy. To remain technologically relevant, teachers must harness the potential of the internet to aid students with the development of their analytic and evaluative skills. The paper outlines an adaptable method for incorporating technology and art into social studies classroom practice in order to build visual literacy, historical understanding, and skills in evidence-based research.

The National Council for the Social Studies has outlined various analytic, communicative, and evaluative skills that students should acquire for social studies literacy. This paper provides insight as to how utilizing digitized collections of artwork has the potential to engage students in active, constructivist learning in order to acquire social studies literacy.

The paper is of value to secondary practitioners who wish to incorporate visual art, technology, and constructivist learning techniques in their classrooms.

This paper aims to investigate the role of body size on female consumers’ fashion brand image perceptions.

An experimental design was used whereby the model’s body size in a fictitious advert was digitally manipulated to create four advertising images with an underweight, slender, average and obese model size (all other factors remained constant). Through an intercept survey of German female consumers, respondents were exposed to one of the four images, and asked questions pertaining to their brand image perceptions.

The findings suggest that for older consumers, model body size has no significant impact on their brand image perceptions. For younger consumers (18-25), there was some limited evidence of how a positive brand image affects when a slender model size is used, but there was no evidence that underweight models have a more positive impact on brand image.

The sample was restricted to a single German city (Berlin) with a relatively small sample and, therefore, the generalisability of the findings may be limited. It would be interesting to repeat the study in different cultural contexts. Whilst this paper focussed on potential differences in perceptions between different age groups, future studies could consider other factors, such as fashion involvement or consumer personality on the impact of body size on brand image.

Given the potential link to low self-esteem and eating disorders, it is recommended that fashion brands cease using clinically underweight models. Brands targeting older consumers may benefit from using larger models.

There is limited research to date that looks at the role of body size on brand image, and this is one of the first studies to consider all non-product-related brand image associations, and how perceptions may differ between different age groups, with many previous studies relying on student samples.