Speaker
Description
As planning emerged as a profession, the education and training of aspiring planners in universities has become a hallmark of this recognition. This has always involved debates and sometimes tension between the expectations of professional bodies (initially for architecture and engineering before the establishment of planning professional bodies) and the pedagogic principles of host universities. In more recent decades governments and civil society institutions (from neighbourhood groups to bodies like AESOP) have become more articulate in their views about planning and their expectations of planners.
As in other fields these debates include the appropriate balance between a general education and professional training, between the acquisition of theoretical and practical knowledge and between classroom and ‘real world’ learning environments.
This presentation begins by surveying some of the trends in the terms of these debates over the last century and the changes in prevailing wisdom about the various balances referred to above. It then presents a case study of planning education in Australia, a country struggling to come to terms with its colonial past and the role of planning in those processes. It is also a country where planning initially adopted many of the principles of early 20th-century British town and country planning and has since come to recognise both its geopolitical location in the Asia Pacific region and the potential value of Indigenous knowledge and traditions of environmental management.
In many parts of Australia at present, university-based planning programs accredited by the Planning Institute of Australia are struggling to enrol students in the numbers expected by their host institutions and are closing. Paradoxically, this is at a time when the demand for qualified planners is very high and the employers of planning students in both the public and private sectors report serious problems of recruitment and retention.
The presentation considers whether existing programs are offering sufficiently inspiring curricula and whether more radical offerings have the potential to not only attract more students but also to prepare them better to work successfully as planners committed to and capable of leading transformative action in an age of planetary crisis.
The presentation draws on my experience as a planning academic teaching courses at undergraduate and postgraduate levels and as an active member of the Planning Institute of Australia (PIA), on both its National Education Committee and as chair of the Education sub-Committee of PIA’s Queensland Division.
| Keywords | Planning education; Professional expectations; Pedagogical debates; Skill shortages |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
