Learning to Improve Practice: Lessons from Practice Stories and Practitioners' Own Discourse Analyses (or Why Only the Loons Show Up)

Abstract

Just as students and faculty must read critically and listen critically in the classroom, community planners and organizers must listen critically, reaching well beyond mere “words” when they work with others in contested, complex, ambiguous settings. So it turns out that a critically pitched discourse analysis can and might be done in political and professional practice settings, especially when issues of participation are central, every bit as much as in the halls of the sophisticated academy. This article explores the challenges of practical, critical and insightful discourse analysis as it can occur both in the planning academy's classrooms and in participatory community planning practices as well.

Keywords:

• community planning
• democratic process
• discourse analysis
• pedagogy
• planning practice

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Workshop on Doing Discourse Analysis, Ringsted, Denmark (December 2008) and the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Nijmegen University (February 2009), when the author was the NICIS Scholar at the University of Amsterdam in 2008–2009. Thanks to Jim Diers, Jacob Torfing, Maarten Hajer, David Laws, David Howarth, and Peter Simonsen for assistance and comments, and to Aletta Norval for prompting me to try to distinguish clearly her “democratic subject formation” from the performative work of creating inter-subjective relationships in potentially democratic contexts.