Toward Grounded Planning: Possibilities for Bridging Theory and Practice through Grounded Learning

Spatial planning, as a profession and a discipline, has been historically rooted in its problem-based approach to improving the welfare of society. The problem-based approach is underpinned not only by planning theories that focus on planning procedures and institutional designs, but also a variety of substantive theories and analytical methods (Faludi, 1973). The latter varies depending on the place, time, and case. Furthermore, planning issues are often cross-disciplinary, and planning concepts evolve constantly. The nature of the planning profession thus poses a tough challenge for planning educators in preparing future planners to help achieve social, ecological, and economic sustainability with sufficient knowledge, skills, and strong self-learning ability. To bridge education and practice, engaging students in real problems and projects has been broadly recognized as a critical part of the curriculum design of a planning school. But this recognition also raises a pedagogical question: To what extent and through which theories and methods can planning educators lead their students to interact with real problems and achieve successful learning?

‘Grounded planning’, the title of the theme issue, expresses a wish to bring new ways of thinking with a focus on preparing future planners to tackle a variety of site-specific and cross-disciplinary challenges through grounded learning in planning education. The term ‘grounded’ is borrowed from grounded theory, one of the best-known qualitative research methods first described by Glaser and Strauss (1967) half a century ago. Grounded theory was designed to create theories that were empirically derived from real-world situations (Oktay, 2012). Grounded theory methods are iterative, reflexive, and inductive; they seek to represent concrete situations and produce abstract theories of real-world complexity (Hammersley, 1992; Bailey et al., 1999). More importantly, grounded theory’s purpose is to build theories with data from the social world, such that the theories are ‘grounded’ in people’s everyday experiences and actions. People’s actions, including those of planners, are influenced by broader historical, geographical, and structural contexts, which makes grounded theory a useful tool for incorporating both human agency and social structures (Knigge & Cope, 2006). Grounded planning, therefore, is a co-construction of theory and practice between academics and practitioners to remedy the perceived gap. It uses theory to develop new models of practice and integrates the insights from practice to improve theory. A core value of grounded theory is the collaboration that bridges the researchers and the practitioners (Oktay, 2012). Therefore, the term ‘grounded’ carries multiple connotations in planning education; it is situated in connecting theory and practice, understanding the real world and specific local contexts, and more importantly, envisioning a collaborative venture between academics and practitioners.

Grounded learning, which shares grounded theory’s inductive, constructivist approach, is an inductive learning process in which the learner is interactively involved with the phenomenon being studied (Schwarz, 1985; Mosca & Howard, 1997; Corner et al., 2006; Smith et al., 2008). Similar terms such as reflective learning (Boyd & Fales, 1983), experiential learning (Kolb, 1984), learning by doing (Schwarz, 1985), active learning (Garvin, 1991), and evolutionary learning (Banathy, 1996) all view learning as an interactive and reflexive process (Corner et al., 2006). Such a learning approach reflects a postmodern approach to education that is against a modern, one-way teacher-student relationship. Rather, it embraces the notion of redesigning the classroom with ‘postmodern acknowledgement of the presence of discontinuities, multiplicities, relativity, cyclicality, voice, community, and cooperation’ (Bilimoria, 1995, p. 441). Grounded learning in planning education thus emphasizes that learning has to be based on local experience and issues. The objective is to optimize learning transfer and facilitate co-learning among faculty and students, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and co-creation through real-world experience with practitioners (stakeholders).

This theme issue includes four papers that use grounded learning to respond to the social-cultural-environmental complexity and educational trends in planning, employing different approaches of experimenting with both seminar and studio courses. Each paper provides a systematic assessment of and reflection on the pedagogies used in both the course design and learning assessment. Taking the classroom as the action research site, the educators (authors) have their own ‘gap’ to bridge: to make a deductive method class more inductive and applicable to the real world (Humer, 2020); to incorporate theory teaching into practice (studio) and make collaborative planning theory operational by designing stakeholder workshops (Chang & Huang, 2022); to synthesize the messy process of knowledge transfer in a real-project setting by creating a conceptual model of co-creation among stakeholders (van Karnenbeek et al., 2020); to develop the boundary-crossing competence of students to prepare them to confront complex environmental planning subjects (Chen et al., 2022). These studies amplify the dimensions of grounded planning and deepen our understanding of the essence of grounded learning.

In the first paper, Humer (2020) finds that a field-based and inductive teaching approach can complement the methodology courses and foster students’ methodological learning. The author enhances student understanding and competence regarding specific planning problems by designing a seminar course to be applied and field-based. Co-learning among students with different method learning groups helps shift learning responsibilities to the students to optimize learning and develop critical thinking about data and methodological approaches. He further addresses the importance of incorporating professional and ethical issues into methodological learning and indicates the potential of grounded learning course design. While considering students’ workload and time limitations, it should be considered in advance as part of the course design that how much the pedagogical weight should be placed on content and the methods.

Chang and Huang (2022) use ‘stakeholder workshop’ as an effective means to engage students in real situations and to apply collaborative planning theory into practice. Their course experiment attempts to make a studio that is sound in both theory and method and grounded in real-world contexts. Stakeholder workshops are a critical instrument to facilitate collaboration among students and stakeholders. The authors find that students can gain concrete experience to promote collaboration, have a better understanding of social complexity and its relation to collaborative planning theory, and develop a keener awareness of their role as a planner and facilitator in the process. Still, additional prior methodological learning, such as interview skills and social analysis, is required. The finding demonstrates that a studio course with a field-based, grounded learning approach provides a great learning opportunity for students to apply planning theory to practice. The design of the entire curriculum and the structure of the relationship between the studio course and other courses are essential aspects that require institutional consensus and support.

Through grounded learning, van Karnenbeek et al. (2020) tackle the conceptualization of the potential types and flows of knowledge in the co-creation process and the application to planning pedagogy. They take a closer look at the types of co-creation, including various actors, multidirectional knowledge, and reciprocal relationships, and establish a conceptual framework of the community knowledge triangle. Based on this conceptualized co-creative model, the course is designed and documented to examine the knowledge flows between students, academics, and practitioners in the planning process. The learning context is grounded by developing a partnership with practitioners in course design and using real projects to provide an authentic learning environment for students. Both academics and students benefit from the educational setting of grounded learning, although not all the learning communities exchange knowledge in the same way or the same amount, especially those from the students to academics and practitioners. Issues such as power structure, time management, and accurate translation of knowledge need to be closely examined to complete the full circle of knowledge co-creation.

Chen et al. (2022) arrange an ‘authentic learning environment’ for students by engaging them in a real national park planning project to develop boundary-crossing competence. To promote students’ understanding of the complexity of environmental planning and to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration, students are assigned to work with local stakeholders as part of a multi-disciplinary team of planning, ecology, and ocean technology professionals. The course is structured by the steps of boundary-crossing in the educational context, including identification, coordination, reflection, and transformation. Authenticity, in this case, is designed at different levels to correspond to societal and analytical complexity in an environmental planning project. The course design provides different levels of grounded learning from a micro-level (the multi-disciplinary teamwork) to a meso-level (the real project involving national park administration, local government, and community). This multi-disciplinary setting and authentic learning environment bring a great challenge to the lecturers and students but result in a better understanding of interdisciplinary collaboration for both. Their systematic learning assessment also reveals how disciplinary background differences can influence the development of interdisciplinary collaboration competence.

In addition to the four papers that make up the special theme on experiments in teaching, two other articles complete this issue. We are pleased to have them alongside the theme papers as they provide the wider context that structures the need for and operation of class-community-research relationships. Through survey research, they provide evidence of worldwide demand, in both the Global North and South, for bridging between academics and practitioners, and emphasize the importance of the ‘local’ — the social-culturally distinct contexts in planning education. In the paper ‘Theory versus Practice in Planning Education: The View from South Africa’, Denoon-Stevens et al. (2020) acknowledge the difficulty in applying the planning theory generated from the North to local contexts and call for the co-creation of a more grounded, locally specific, applied theory. In the paper ‘Planning Practice and Academic Research: Views from the Parallel Worlds’, Goodman et al. (2017) reveal the divide between academics and professional planners and indicate the necessity of collaboration between the two groups. Both papers demonstrate the need to produce grounded planning theory through the collaboration between local planning academics and practitioners. Their urgent call reminds us of the premise as well as the potential contribution of grounded learning in planning education to the generation of grounded planning theory to make theory and method more integrated with local contexts, as the theme papers have shown.

Planning education’s value extends beyond the planning profession. As an applied science, it offers contemporary education many lessons learned. It is about bridging theory and method, academics and practice, teaching and learning, the classroom and the real world. Some planning scholars may distinguish between academic, practice, and educational activities. These three types of activities, in fact, can complement each other, and education acts as a medium between the divided worlds of academics and practice. In particular, a locally-based, grounded learning approach to planning education could be the platform for interaction and collaboration. The examples provided in this theme issue not only enable us to develop a finer-grained perspective about the gap but also demonstrate the pedagogical strategies to bridge that gap. Through this theme issue, we hope to stimulate discussion and exploration of the possibilities and limitations of grounded learning and bring new ways of thinking about grounded planning.

Acknowledgments

This special issue is a joint effort between the pre-organized session “Planning Education and Community-Based Research and Practice” in the 2018 AESOP Annual Congress and the 2018 iCities Forum with the theme “Grounded Planning: University Social Responsibility and Reflections on Planning Education and Practices.” We thank Vincent Nadin and Andrea Frank for their feedback and contributions to making this special issue happen.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).