UCL's 6th biennial Teaching & Learning Conference 15-16 April 2008

Teaching social sciences to spatial planners and future built

environment professionals. Educating for social responsibility?

Claire ColombThe Bartlett School of Planningc.colomb@ucl.ac.uk

Introduction & outline of the presentation

1. The changing context for the education of built environment professionals

2. Teaching urban sociology to planners: course design and curriculum development

3. Innovation in teaching delivery: generating curiosity and critical thinking

4. Educating for 'global citizenship' and social responsibility? Encouraging ‘critical practitioners’

5. Evidence of positive reception of teaching & further development

1. The changing context for the education of built environment professionals

• Global• National• Planning discipline and profession• UCL• Department

Global context

• The urban challenge• Climate change and sustainability: the key role of

cities• International migrations: impact on European

cities

National context

• Spatial planning and urban regeneration now key issues on the policy agenda of New Labour.

• A high demand for professionals in this field.• government has pressed for the promotion of new

‘skills’ (Egan Review of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, 2004)

Planning discipline and profession

• The RTPI defines ‘planning’ as the ‘making of place and mediation of space’, and the objective of planning education as encouraging 'critical thinking about space and place as the basis for action or intervention' (RTPI, 2003).

• The professional accrediting body for planners, the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI), has triggered a major reform in planning education in the early 2000s which had an impact on all planning schools in the UK.

• Recent reforms of planning education: ambiguous impacts!

UCL

• Global citizenship and internationalization agenda

• New transdisciplinary initiatives to tackle global challenges (global health, environment, cities)

Department

• The specific nature of planning education: challenges for teaching

• Increasing student numbers and poor facilities: maintaining teaching quality

• Undergraduate programme: wide diversity of student body (70% BME in BSc programme)

• Students: keen interest in cities and in ‘changing places’… but not necessarily in ‘sociology’!

The challenge

• To enhance the analytical skills and sense of social responsibility/global citizenship of future planners and built environment professionals educated at UCL.

2. Teaching urban sociology to planners: course design and curriculum development

• In 2002 I took over the teaching of Urban Sociology in the School of Planning and redesigned the course to encourage students to:– critically analyse the social and political construction of ‘urban

problems’ and understand the rationale of urban (public) policies and other interventions on urban space [of which they will be a part in their future professional practice].

– become ‘socially-minded’ professionals who take into account the socio-economic, cultural, ethnic, and spatial divisions which characterise our societies and try to address them rather than ignore them.

• Future planners and urban designers have to understand the social, economic and political dynamics of contemporary cities before they can strategically think about planning and designing improvements to ‘space’ and ‘place’.

• Fostering students’ understanding of the social dynamics of cities, exploring the interrelationships between society and urban space, between social change and spatial processes.

• Redesigned the curriculum of the course to address the contemporary challenges facing future planners in UK and European cities

• Integrate current social and policy issues of key significance

• Emphasise the effects of economic and social restructuring on urban change and social inequalities in cities, as well as the policies which have been designed to address the urban issues that arise.

Themes covered:

Urbanisation patterns in the UK - the impact of economic restructuring and socio-demographic change on British cities

Inequalities and urban space: processes of spatial polarisation, segregation and exclusion

From urban poverty to social exclusion: conceptualisation of urban deprivation

Urban policies and the political construction of urban problems:Using social sciences for a critical analysis of urban policy

Ethnic minorities and the city: integration, exclusion and urban policy

Cultures in the city…

… & culture for the city

Social disorder, insecurity and the “fortress city”

• Over the past 5 years, new themes were introduced to respond to issues of increasing national and global significance:

– After the July 2005 London bombings, a new session on ethnic minorities, integration and multiculturalism in UK cities was introduced.

– A discussion of New Labour’s agenda on crime and anti-social behaviour was also recently included in the course.

3. Innovation in teaching delivery: generating curiosity and critical thinking

• Mix of lectures and interactive seminars • Aim: make students critically discuss the

implications of the social trends and tensions shaping contemporary cities for their future professional practice as planners.

• Various teaching methods used to trigger students’ interest, to generate debates and discussions + enhance the students’ learning experience

• Each seminar uses a different method:– film/documentary screening– Debates (in various forms)– web-based research+creation of a database on Moodle– critical analysis of media materials (construction of

social problems)

• Seminar activities guided by a short brief (key questions).

• Examples: – Can planning and urban policy get people back into

‘compact’ cities? – Can planners “design out crime”? – Can good urban design restore civility and sustainable

communities in contemporary cities? – Can British inner cities undergo ‘urban regeneration’

without ‘gentrification’?

• Students have to ‘construct’ their own knowledge by discussion.

• Most of the materials students need are ‘on their doorstep’:

• London is used as a rich case-study to illustrate and discuss issues of global significance for contemporary cities - social exclusion, diversity, ethnicity, segregation, insecurity and anti-social behaviour, and the influence that planning can have on those issues.

• Personal experiences are encouraged as valid source of knowledge.

4. Educating for 'global citizenship' and social responsibility? Encouraging ‘critical practitioners’

• The key objective is to raise students’ awareness of their social responsibility as future professionals in the field of planning, urban design and urban regeneration.

• UCL’s strategic commitment to educate students for 'global citizenship' and social and environmental responsibility (as expressed in the Institutional Learning and Teaching Strategy 2005-2010).

How to achieve that?– encourage students to critically analyse the social and political

construction of ‘urban problems’; – understand the rationale for public and private interventions over

urban space (justifications, policy narrative)– make their future practice informed by a sound understanding of

the social impacts of their activities.

• In particular encourage them to ‘deconstruct’ negative media and social stereotypes, perceptions and discriminatory attitudes to certain problems, places or groups of people.

• A form of ‘conceptual change learning’ defined by Bowden (1990).

Integrating ‘diversity’

• By its very nature, the course integrates issues of diversity, ethnicity and equal opportunity in the city.

• Students bring some of their personal experience in the seminar discussions and ‘subjectivity’ is used as an asset, as long as students can be reflexive about the impact of their cultural and social ‘baggage’ on their way of ‘seeing the world’.

Challenges for the teacher

• How to deal with the subjectivity of each person’s views on society and social problems? With one’s own normative values (which inevitably transpire into teaching?)

• The presence of implicit political opinions in teaching and in assessment?

• Moderating discussions on ‘difficult topics’: religion and multiculturalism.

5. Evidence of positive reception / further development

• Student and peers’ feedback over the past years

• Provost’s Teaching Award 2006-2007

Future development of the activities

• Change the assessment method: a term-long London based project?

• Dissemination of the teaching materials developed

• Collaborative work with colleagues in other departments or disciplines (UCL Urban Lab / new MSc Urban Studies)

• Further educational research on the role of social sciences in planning education

References• Bowden, J. A. (1990) Curriculum development for conceptual change learning: a

phenomenographic pedagogy (Occasional Paper No. 90.3), Melbourne: ERADU - RMIT.• Goodstadt, V. (2005) Rebuilding the Planning Community: Questioning the Orthodox

and Speaking the Truth, Planning Theory & Practice, 6 (2), pp. 247-249.• Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (2004) The Egan Review. Skills for Sustainable

Communities,• London: ODPM, available online at

http://renew.co.uk/FileUploads/Skills_for_Sustainable_Communities.pdf [last visited on 7/06/07].

• Peel, D. (2006) Planning Educational Research and the UK Research Assessment Exercise, Journal for Education in the Built Environment, 1 (1), pp. 30-50.

• Royal Town Planning Institute (2003) Policy Statement on Initial Planning Education, London: RTPI.

• Rowland, S. (2006) The enquiring University. Compliance and contestation in higher education, Maidenhead: Open University Press.

• University College London (2005), Institutional Learning and Teaching Strategy 2005-2010, London: UCL, available online at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/Staff_pages/policy_context.htm [last visited on 7/06/07].

Thank you for your attention.

Questions?