Teaching for Practice

Abstract

Planning educators endeavor to prepare students for professional practice. Recent literature describes approaches that enhance this mission, including alternative pedagogies and teaching practice. Important to practice is relating knowledge and experience to new situations, a skill developed through reflecting on practice experiences. This article addresses efforts to integrate reflection into planning internship. The authors discuss the internship with reference to their masters of city and regional planning program as well as internship issues and expectations. They present thought questions developed to implement reflection in the internship and present student responses to them.

City Planners and Public Service Motivation

“…Christensen (1993) recommended that planning educators go beyond teaching technical skills to also teach students to be 'savvy' about working in a political context. In planning education, a great deal of energy is spent trying to figure out how to teach students to deal with context and be able to adapt their training to particulars (Schön, 1987;Baum, 1997b;Brooks et al, 2002;Harris, 2004;Freestone et al, 2006). Indeed, when planning processes are tailored to local circumstances, they are more effective (Bryson et al, 1990).…”

Walking with Youth in Los Platanitos: Learning Mobilities, Youth Inclusion, and Co-production in International Planning Studios

“…Beyond technical and thematic training for aspiring planning professionals, such studios also provide important opportunities for critical reflexivity and personal growth for students, as they are forced to grapple with socio-economic inequities that produce unequal, racialized, and gendered geographies (Elwood 2004; Harris and Irazábal 2012; Healey and Jenkins 2000). Service-learning and other alternative, practice-based pedagogical strategies provide “a shift in learning from knowing what to knowing how, improved collaboration, and improved ability to apply concepts” to “real-world projects through the production of practical outputs” (Brooks et al 2002, 188), which are particularly relevant skills for reflective practitioners (Schön 1987) working in complex, unequal, and politically fraught environments. Fostering such critical reflexivity is especially important in what Sopher, Gewirtzman, and Kalay (2019) refer to as “multi-setting” studio courses that seek to facilitate co-productive processes with marginalized populations to develop collaborative projects for social and environmental justice.…”