Future Planning Practitioners and the “Waipahu Talk Story”: Learning from and Reflecting on Participation

Abstract

Fifty years ago, Sherry Arnstein presented “a ladder of citizen participation,” highlighting the relevance of citizen participation for the social imperatives of her time. Today, there is widespread emphasis on public participation in planning practice. Planning education stresses its importance in addressing the principles of social justice. This prompted us to explore how graduate students on the threshold of becoming planning practitioners designed public engagement tools, and facilitated participation to examine proposed transit-oriented development plans. Our paper analyzes the nature of their engagement and reflection, spotlighting the potential and pitfalls of doing public participation. We find that enabling critical pedagogical approaches to engender collaborative and reflective practice benefits students, educators, and the profession in distinct ways.

Talk-Story: Performing an Indigenous Research Methodology With Hesitant Non-Indigenous Participants to Learn Previously Silenced Knowledge

“…As an authentic joint performance, talk-story encourages respect for the participants’ opinions and feelings, but playful questioning is permitted (Foy, 2009). However, trust in the knowledge-sharing process is assured by forbidding insinuations that the speaker does not understand their own lived experiences (Das et al, 2020; Nishizaki, et al, 2019).…”

“…Founded on the Polynesian oral tradition of knowledge sharing, respect, and accepting relational accountability for human interactions with the wider environment, talk-story has existed for millennia (de Silva & Hunter, 2021). Guided by the Hawaiian concept of Kuleana, meaning that each participant is responsible for delivering a reciprocal value, the benefits of talk-story are achieved by agreeing that the balance of rights in the researcher's and the participant's knowledge has equal worth (Das et al, 2020). Likewise, there is a tacit agreement that the holistic complexity of lived experiences will be explored beyond caricatures and single issues by acknowledging that reflexivity is a human trait rather than a gift bestowed upon a select few researchers (Archer, 2012).…”