Pedagogy built on working with communities

Book of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017Preparing students for practice is the key challenge in planning education. Since the late 1990s, the issue of how to balance theory, methods, skills, and practice oriented courses in the core curriculum has been widely debated. Partly as a result of the greater emphasis in the 2006 Planning Accreditation Board guidelines on plan making skills, and partly in response to the increasing demand from students for hands on learning, most planning schools in the United States have by now incorporated practice oriented courses into their core curriculum(Edwards and Bates 2011, Vidhardi, et.al. 2012). Depending on how each program defines what planning is or ought to be, the strategies to incorporate practice oriented learning into the curriculum ranges from special seminars, internship requirements to studios (Lang 1983, Long 2012). Over two thirds (69%) of the 80 schools listed in the 2015 Planetizen Guide to Graduate Urban Planning Programs by now have a studio course requirement. Still, studio pedagogy is neither “dominant, not does it play a significant role in the earliest stages of planning education” (Long 2012, 438). Several questions remain on how to define, incorporate, and assess learning outcomes of studios in planning education (Long 2012, Vidharthi, et.al. 2012).Published versio