The Department as a Third Sector Planner

Abstract

Community-university partnerships are an established concept but are not typically central to the core planning curriculum. This study highlights a model of teaching innovation, Integrated Community Planning Core, where the core directly supports the departmental mission by bridging research and practice. The article explains the curriculum development process and assesses its ability to serve community, student, and faculty needs. Data collected from focus groups, student reflection papers, and practicing planner debriefings demonstrate the model is modestly successful, but adaptations are needed to communicate the value to students, the planning academy, and the university.

Keywords

planning education community capacity curriculum innovation community-university partnerships

Introduction

Both planning scholars and policy makers tout the value of universities as rooted anchor institutions and credit them with job creation, urban transformation, knowledge transfer, and identity building (Birch 2010). However, the focus on property and/or regional economic development overlooks how individual academic units may play a different role as community anchors.¹ Moving beyond a conversation that treats the university as a monolithic entity, we pursue a microanalysis that considers how the departmental unit as a third-sector player influences change and/or creates capacity outside the physical university footprint and beyond the university as an economic anchor.

The “community-university partnership” (CUP) reflects this rooted connection and is a well-used and diversified concept.² Typically, CUPs embody a spectrum from faculty-led course projects to larger multiuniversity initiatives that tackle local or “glocalized” problems (Cox 2004; Harris and Chou 2001). Planning departments and/or its individual instructors are often involved in CUPs and champion public engagement, civic education, technical assistance, and service learning activities. Despite the central focus of community work in many planning programs, we rarely see community partnerships integrated into the core planning curriculum in a comprehensive fashion. In our case, a group of individuals, including the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce, asked the department to take on the role of a third-sector planner with an important role in increasing local and state planning capacity. This community mandate caused us to (1) define our mission to be community-driven and (2) develop a curriculum driven by community capacity building. While it is common for planning programs to do applied projects in their host communities, they are the cornerstone of our core planning curriculum. In this article, we evaluate the impact of a community-driven core planning curriculum on student, community and faculty outcomes while meeting both national Planning Accreditation Board (PAB) curriculum criteria and increased accountability requirements imposed by state legislatures and university administrations.

Before we can discuss our mission driven curriculum, we need to distinguish among four fundamentally different initiators of curriculum change that embody a different set of resources, expectations, and stimuli (Table 1). The first model, “Structural Assessment,” occurs when a national accrediting body makes significant changes in its standards and guidelines to reflect broader challenges facing the field and profession. The revision of PAB standards in April 2012 is an example of this. In the case of planning, this model is instigated or driven by global changes in the profession. It does not take into account changes in university structure; nor does it prioritize environmental (here, referred to in a geographic and political context—or the planning culture of place) context or local demand for planning jobs. The second model, “University Adaptation,” is a campus-wide response to internal and external change. Currently, this is driven by demands for accountability for retention rates, learning outcomes, and job placement. Often these externally driven “innovations” are the outcome of state or federal mandates. A variant of this is the adoption of new ways of learning and pedagogy to meet the needs of both a changing student population and changes in technology (e.g., massive open online courses [MOOCs]). The third model, “Faculty Replacement,” transpires at the department level and occurs through faculty replacement. When departments hire faculty to replace existing lines or to start new research areas, their new hires influence pedagogical direction within the department and the content and approaches of individual courses. This shift can steer widespread change when departments recruit academic powerhouses to help brand a particular department, or it can be more subtle with the hiring of new emerging scholars who have their own agendas that may influence curriculum direction. The fourth model, “Community Capacity Expansion,” and the focus of our study, occurs when the needs of the community in which the university is located or rooted drive or influence curriculum direction.³ Here, demand can be high for university resources or expertise particularly in communities where there are significant challenges. This localized catalyst can present a precarious situation where departments are simultaneously trying to respond to both national accreditation calls to be more globally connected while fulfilling the needs of the community that perhaps are quite different than what mainstream or cutting- edge planning is advocating.

Table 1.

Initiators of Curriculum Change.

Model	Initiator	Focus	Driver
Structural Assessment	Professional accrediting body	“Global” changes in knowledge and skills required in the profession	Externally imposed
University Adaptation	University administration	Changes in the environment of higher education (currently focusing on accountability and efficiency)	Externally imposed
Faculty Replacement	Department/faculty	Depends on departmental needs and priorities	Internal choice
Community Capacity Expansion	Community	Either technical assistance/support of planning function or preparation of graduates for local workforce	External choice/opportunity

We approached the design of our curriculum as a community-driven model through a pedagogical innovation labeled “Integrated Community Planning Core” (ICPC). The ICPC approaches a single community project across three core courses in a single semester. The method is designed to meet both student demands for skills and the community’s request and need to build planning capacity. Our guiding principle was that through the ICPC we could create an intensive integrated learning environment that would serve the community, our students, and our department while meeting national PAB curriculum criteria. In that vein, we make four arguments to explain the ICPC experiment. First, we argue that our students are better off than if they took the individual classes alone without a common client by developing higher levels of thinking according to Bloom’s taxonomy (Iowa State University: Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching 2014), are more prepared for the job market, and have a stronger connection to the planning community. Second, we argue that the ICPC is better for the community in that more resources are directed towards a local problem, increasing planning capacity in an underserved planning environment. Third, we argue that the ICPC allows us to meet the PAB “general planning knowledge” criterion while strengthening components of PAB’s “planning skills” and “values and ethics.” Finally, we argue that the ICPC benefits our department by creating a niche through both a unique place-based curriculum and a very strong connection with planning practice.

Through focus group data, individual student reflection papers, and community partner debriefings, we conducted a formative evaluation to improve the ICPC process and hopefully its outcomes. We find that the first year of the ICPC experiment is a modest success with an immediate impact on the planning capacity of communities and the creation of exciting opportunities for our students. We also find that the model needs adaptation to better balance the needs of students, community partners, and faculty members. In particular, there are challenges with how to show added value and productivity in ways that are not well developed within the traditional view of the university or within PAB. As this is our first year, additional long-term and longitudinal data need to be collected to show that the ICPC has greater value than single-course community projects and justifies the department and faculty investment.

This study’s significance is threefold. First, it suggests the need to recast the anchor concept where universities do more than create jobs or remake urban space but play a significant role as a third-sector planner in the local or regional community through their (planning) departments. Such a model moves far beyond securing external clients for a project or using the community as a laboratory to integrating it in a more comprehensive fashion through the planning core. Second, it offers an innovative model for integrating mission-driven community work into the core. Third, it suggests the need for the planning academy to reconsider the role that departments play in the community in a way that goes beyond focusing on issues that are of global concern to also ensuring capacity and knowledge to meet localized or specialized needs.

Literature Review: Scholarship of Engagement

There is a well-documented tension in planning education between academic and practitioner priorities (Agyeman and Erickson 2012; Edwards and Bates 2011; Frank 2002; Looye and Sesay 1998; Merrill and Lapping 2007). The issue of planning education’s responsibility for local capacity building has long been a concern (Wetmore and Heumann 1988; Silver 2014). There is also a significant body of current literature about the relationship between the university and its rooted community, which typically falls under the broad umbrella of “scholarship of engagement” (Kotval 2003; Wiewel and Knaap 2005; Reardon 2006; D’Agostino 2008; Sletto 2010; Bourner 2010; Shea 2011; Northmore and Hart 2011; O’Loughlin 2013). Rather than treating these different lines of inquiry as separate, we chose to focus on the relationship between curricula, practice, and community because of our mission.

The call for civic engagement of planning programs dates to the 1980s (Benson, Harkavy, and Puckett 2000; Jelier and Clarke 1999) when “the challenges that many cities faced were knowledge intensive” (O’Loughlin 2013, 1). Shea notes the positive attributes of such a strategic alignment:

Creative partnerships among universities, city agencies and organizations have the potential to leverage the strengths of all three to: (1) identify and articulate community-defined needs and priorities; (2) systematically identify and map community resources; (3) provide students with service learning and field research opportunities; and (4) help neighborhoods and community organizations weather crises and emerge from them stronger. (2011, 1)

It is these creative partnerships that, while prevalent, are not typically central to the planning core curriculum. Instead, existing scholarship talks about these rooted relationships through the language of community-university partnerships (as used here) (Shea 2011), higher engagement (O’Loughlin 2013), student learning from community engagement (Bourner 2010), campus-based community service (Reardon 2006), community-university engagement (Northmore and Hart 2011), experimental learning (Kotval 2003), technical assistance (Wiewel and Knaap 2005), and service learning (D’Agostino 2008; Sletto 2010). As Reardon (2006, 95) notes, “One of the most powerful trends within contemporary American higher education is the movement towards greater student and faculty involvement in community-based planning and development efforts in low-income communities.” This argument likely extends to low-capacity communities broadly, but the context matters. Reardon touches on the problem of low capacity in a way that is similar to our own context, but the wickedness of the problems that Reardon’s work in East St. Louis describes is not necessarily comparable to our setting where the problems are complex but differ in scope, scale, and landscape. Even when acknowledging and preparing for the unique context, the question remains how community-university partnerships can move from just a good experience to substantive change and an increase in planning capacity.

Most curriculum research has centered on one-off projects, integration within single courses, integration within universities (action research), or university initiatives tackling wicked problems (Kotval 2003; Dick 2011; Wiewel and Knaap 2005). There is also an emphasis on partnership structure or idea diffusion as a way to better understand and assess “the gap between preaching and practice” (Christensen et al. 2009; Wiewel and Knaap 2005). Reardon (2006, 96) summarizes Schramm and Nye’s evaluation of HUD’s Community Outreach Partnership Center Program that “encourage[d] colleges and universities to apply their human, technical, and institutional resources to the challenge of revitalizing distressed communities.” These evaluators identify three partnership types: first, the “paternalistic/theory-testing partnership” where the “community is a laboratory”; second, the “professional/expertise partnership” where universities control the process with limited community engagement; and third, “empowerment/capacity building partnership” where a “reciprocal” learning process took place throughout the research process to deal with complex issues” (Reardon 2006, 96). While not an exhaustive typology, such work helps consider what role the university, or department as it is likely to be, would want in a community-oriented curriculum.

In articulating and reporting their own experiences, faculty reflects on their observations “in the ‘doing’ of engaged scholarship” (McNall et al. 2009). Reflections studies are abundant across disciplines (Northmore and Hart 2011; Reardon 2006; D’Agostino 2008; Sletto 2010; Kotval 2003). For example, Kotval (2003) offers an excellent review of the literature on the benefits and challenges of such community work through an analysis of capstone workshops at the University of Michigan. Kotval’s work moves the conversation from a broader discussion about partnerships to the mechanics of such collaborations. In general, these contemporary studies focus on how to make collaborations work better or more efficiently, which touches on the culture not just of individual institutions but also on the culture of place. Winkler (2013) in her study on active learning in Cape Town adds another component when she asks whether community partners “get” anything from such partnerships or if students are the only ones that benefit from this kind of leveraged work. Others used specific cases to point to the negative repercussions of university involvement whether the partner distrusts university motives, doubts the university’s claim of a neutral position, or is concerned about project outcomes (e.g., gentrification) (Goldsmith 1998; Pilkington 2007; Webb 2013; Fehsenfeld 2010; Hutchinson and Loukaitou-Sideris 2001). Here, the critical argument is that the university, through its faculty and students, is acting in the best interest of the university, not the community. To supplement the many rich cases that largely focus on the faculty perspective, this study offers rigorous assessment mechanisms that provide robust insight into the experiences of the students. In other examples, the focus is on a single-course experience rather than testing the pedagogical experiment over time to see how ongoing feedback could improve the situation or if different circumstances would alter the outcomes. This line of inquiry further gives weight about how to measure assessment not just in university or department language or criteria, but how to measure whether such interventions have helped community challenges and, in our case, issues of capacity.

The research offers significant insight into community-driven impulses that shape or reframe curricula in a number of different academic fields. But more evidence and/or experiences are needed as they relate to planning education and practice, and the core curriculum in particular. First, a great deal of the literature centers on disciplines that do not necessarily have the same applied connection to the community as planning. Second, these studies provide limited contextual information about the relationship of the project to the core curriculum or the relationship between the community and the university, not to mention the conditions under which the project was undertaken. Third, the research does not discuss how partnerships meet accreditation and/or broader university expectations for the department. Finally, the community model of innovation is less studied from a planning pedagogical standpoint, as is its connection to the core curriculum mentioned above. This is unsurprising as many entrenched or established universities have a weaker community mandate and strive to be part of a global conversation. This focus is understandable; however, it often overlooks the daily planning issues that communities face. Community-based research is not necessarily en vogue, particularly since it is not always about the cutting edge of planning, although that varies by place and case. Some universities demand community outreach as part of its mission and expect the department to follow suit while also churning out high-performing individual faculty members as defined by the publication of peer-reviewed articles and the ability to secure prestigious grants. Thus, our study asks, How do we integrate a departmental mission of community capacity building into the core planning curriculum while meeting both national PAB curriculum criteria and increased accountability requirements imposed by state legislatures and university administrations?

Community Context: The Bottom-Up Choice for Pedagogical Innovation

Our graduate planning department was created in response to a call by the community to create local planning capacity in a quickly growing region in the Intermountain West with limited resources to plan and prepare for urbanization and its related challenges. While many communities face these issues, they are not front-and-center of contemporary planning conversations with the possible exception of some environmental and land use discussions (Smith and Freemuth 2007) and some targeted urban histories (Abbott 2008). Furthermore, the state lacks a strong tradition of planning education informally, civically or in institutions of higher learning. The public planners who were in place, with the exception of a handful who were trained out-of-state, were making planning recommendations and policy without a deep understanding of theory, history, or planning process. A small planning program existed at the land grant university in the northern, rural part of the state, but its curriculum focus and six-hour, three-hundred-mile distance from the capital city made it difficult to serve the needs of the main metropolitan region. The hidden planning culture reflects palpable tensions between growth and planned control due to an antitax and anti-interventionist attitude in an extreme Dillon Rule state with strong property rights attitudes with severe restrictions on public financing of urban and rural development due to no local option tax and supermajority mandates for bonding measures. It is in this context that policy makers and planners have been forced to confront challenges with few resources, which creates a situation of high need but low capacity.

From the beginning, both the university and the planning and development community viewed the department as a third-sector planner with the clear expectation that the department would fully engage in local and regional planning issues. Initially, the faculty favored a safe, solid curriculum that followed a path towards securing PAB accreditation. Students picked typical field specializations and tailored their schedules with community projects at the discretion of individual faculty members or through departmental grant opportunities. The curriculum was solid and seemed in compliance with PAB curriculum criteria but was not-place specific—a need that seemed in contradiction to its formation. In the fall of 2013, all four initiators of curriculum change that we identified earlier (Table 1) aligned. PAB published its new accreditation standards that seemed more flexible with regard to curriculum while more rigorous with regard to assessment of learning outcomes and accountability. The university administration expressed a need for the department to play a leadership role in planning for the region based on community demand, and the department had completed its search for three new faculty and a new director.

The confluence of these different events created the space and opportunity to initiate a multi-level examination of the curriculum. The goals of this review were to build the program, to identify assessment strategies, and to align the curriculum with revised national standards. With regard to curriculum content, we started an extensive dialogue with local planners and community organizations about the specific skills that our students would need in order to have a successful career as a planner in the West. We worked with an instructional design consultant over a five-month period to assess the core curriculum. The review revealed that the core complied with the PAB requirements, but that it did not (1) take advantage of the unique opportunities at the University, (2) consider the needs of the local community and the State, and (3) make deliberate choices about pedagogy. The faculty realized that while the department was clear about the uniqueness of planning in the “West,” we had given less thought about how to incorporate this planning culture in our curriculum.

Based on our reading of the revised national accreditation standards and its guidance to “be reflective of the community in which the University operates,” we revised our mission statement to reinforce our commitment to the Intermountain West and to build local capacity. The question for the faculty became how to give meaning to this mission through the core planning curriculum and—in line with PAB criteria—how to show progress towards fulfilling our mission.

Methodology: An Integrated Core Planning Curriculum Model

The faculty considered several community-based curriculum innovations, including the favored route of service learning, which the faculty decided against it because it was course specific, did not allow for flexibility and innovation as Baum (2000) notes as necessities, and it also seemed incompatible with the emphasis of integrating the community into the core. We examined other successful planning initiatives, including the University of Oregon’s innovative Sustainable Communities program, that create a foundation or structure for many other universities to embrace, but we wanted greater flexibility in the projects and projects that were selected to fit within specific learning outcomes. In the end, based on findings from our curriculum assessment combined with an existing one-off joint course, we decided our best course of action was to implement a cross-core combination and we looked to other university resources to help formalize the idea.⁴

We developed the ICPC model at an intensive, weeklong Institute on Curriculum Design sponsored by the University’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). During this institute, faculty worked closely with curriculum experts to create a community core curriculum that incorporated assessment and learning outcomes. While driven by community needs, the decision to move in this direction also reflected the university’s mandate to grow the program and create a clear focus for the program based on its mission to facilitate PAB accreditation. More than anything else, we saw this as an opportunity to develop our own identity and niche within the planning academy.

We reconfigured the existing curriculum in a series of four “themed” semesters in which two different core courses together perform an applied research project in the community that helps students apply the theoretical concepts covered in class (Figure 1). The underlying thought behind the design was that there are theoretical and skills courses within the existing curriculum that can be used to support each other and improve student learning if they are taught in the same semester with deliberate feedback between the two courses. The experiment also involved the creation of an “integration” course to create a community of learning⁵ that includes all students in the program and provides an deliberate opportunity to reflect (Schőn 1983) on learning throughout the semesters and to consider general issues that practicing planners need to be able to address such as professional ethics, issues of social justice and diversity, data and research limitations, leadership, and professionalism—topics that are prioritized by the new PAB standards.

Our objectives with the redesign were fourfold: (1) to provide communities and local organizations with a vehicle to receive technical assistance from the University, (2) to create deliberate integration points to reflect on the application of planning theory and practice across courses and projects, (3) to help students advance their knowledge and skills to a higher level while developing a professional portfolio, and (4) to exceed university and PAB expectations.

The department compiled a list of potential projects requested by community members after an informal call for projects was released. From this list, the faculty selected ones that seemed to align well with the respective learning objectives of each core courses. In later semesters, more projects were added in response to increasing community demand. The first semester matched the weekly core courses of CRP505 Community Data and CRP501 Introduction to Community and Regional Planning with the one-credit integration course. The community partner, Boise’s Parks and Recreation Department, requested a user study of a major bike and pedestrian transportation corridor. Students and volunteers from the parks and recreation department conducted a survey on the green corridor over a three-day period to understand use, user profile, preferences, and travel behavior. While the ICPC’s first project had several flaws in faculty execution and in project design, the project culminated in a high-quality, professional study—a joint effort among students, the Public Policy Center, and the Center for Idaho History and Politics that remains one of the Parks and Recreation Department’s most downloaded reports. The second semester aligned CRP500 Introduction to Planning History and Theory and CRP501 Introduction to Policy Formation and Geographic Information Systems. Boise’s Departments of Planning and Development Services and Arts and History were a joint client and were interested in looking at how to increase neighborhood planning capacity in a city that had few resources to direct towards these areas. The city’s sole neighborhood planner introduced the project and provided information and neighborhood contacts and intermittently engaged throughout the process in response to limit the time that was put into the project at the behest of the planning director. While a bit “fuzzy” in scope, the students performed qualitative and quantitative data collection through interviews, surveys, and historical analysis while working with the city’s curator to turn this information into a communicative planning tool. The students produced a policy report on how to build neighborhood capacity, and created a community exhibition at the City’s downtown exhibition gallery. This exhibition showcased sustainability from the perspectives of three neighborhoods and its residents and business owners and attempted to change the city’s focus of attention from its downtown to the neighborhoods. The project helped the departments’ goals of developing stronger connections with neighborhood groups, laying the groundwork for future neighborhood initiatives, and supported the neighborhoods by giving them a voice to express their own histories.”

Core Assessment: Analysis of Student, Community, and Faculty Outcomes

The ICPC was implemented during the 2013–2014 academic year with an additional year of preparation and pilot testing. With regard to student learning outcomes we undertook a multilevel assessment process that was influenced by a broader pedagogical philosophy laid out by Anderson and Krathwohl’s (2001; Iowa State University: Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching 2014) revision of Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy that aligns four knowledge dimensions against six cognitive process dimensions. The former ranges from factual to metacognitive knowledge where students evolve from expressing facts to critical and reflective development. The latter spans the spectrum of “remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating” where students evolve as well. Put simply, we were interested in a transparent process that helped our students move from regurgitating facts and figures to becoming critical thinkers, communicators and reflectors. These more advanced skills seemed to resonate with PAB expectations, and a Provost-funded labor marketing study that evaluated important graduate skills identified by local APA leadership. Our assessment is a formative evaluation in that we were looking for ways to strengthen the ICPC model and, thus, the outcomes for our students, community partners, and faculty members.

Following Bloom’s model, we built an assessment framework that started with departmental mission-driven learning objectives and trickled down to the curriculum goals and the objectives outlined for each individual course combination. The departmental learning outcome articulated that by the end of the program, students should:

Demonstrate an understanding and sensitivity of the complex ethical realm and equity issues of professional planners specifically with respect to diverse culture, people, and places.

Show an evolutionary knowledge of planning practice and theory.

Demonstrate expertise in both qualitative and quantitative skills through research design, data gathering, and analysis.

Identify the internal and external forces that shape planning cultures and context.

Identify and actively engage stakeholders in planning in a meaningful way.

Apply theory to practice.

Communicate effectively with internal and external audiences.

Utilize planning expertise with an understanding of the unique qualities and challenges of communities in the Western Region of the United States.

Appropriately assess complex situations and determine their role in moving the planning process forward.

Thus, we asked, to what extent did the ICPC achieve the department’s learning objectives?

Embedded in the assessment was whether the students were able to communicate the values of the community learning process, whether the community partner benefited or whether it was one-directional way of learning, and whether the department had the capacity to implement such a rigorous and time-consuming endeavor. Answers to these questions allowed us to consider what worked and did not work in the ICPC model. The following individual and comprehensive assessment instruments were used: reflection papers for individual courses, a year-end focus group of students led by an external curriculum facilitator, a year-end focus group of faculty led by an external curriculum expert, and a year-end community partner debriefing. This broad set of assessments allows for different voices to convey the meaning and value of the ICPC by using data from the perspective of students, community partners, and faculty members.

Community Outcomes

Taking into account Winkler’s (2013) call to address community benefits, we evaluated community impact that went beyond acting as an external classroom for the students. We requested separate meetings during the semester with our community clients to garner their feedback. The Parks and Recreation Department, an arms-length partner, had little feedback other than a desire to continue the survey on an annual basis. Our relationship very much resembled Reardon’s (2006) professional/expertise partnership where the students and faculty members took control and were leveraged for their expertise while the local organization was removed from the process and acted as a beneficiary. For example, they did not have the technical or personnel capacity to undertake such a study and were committed to an ongoing relationship with the department. Their enthusiastic response centered on their desire to have information that could shape policy and investment decisions particularly in relation to equity and social justice issues along the greenbelt. The ICPC project changed their decision-making process and brought greater awareness to issues that were “hidden” from the parks traditional purview and framework. At a day-to-day level, the survey also led to way-finding investments that would not have been otherwise made. The faculty also assessed the project, realizing that a stronger alignment needed to made between the course project and the course content, a full redesign that took place in Fall 2015 with the newest Greenbelt survey.

The second project with the city’s neighborhood planners, arts and history executive director, and arts and history curator yielded a more complex response. In applying Reardon’s (2006) typology again, the relationship seemed to be a hybrid of “paternalistic/theory” testing where the community was a laboratory for exploring planning history and theory, and an “empowerment/capacity building” partnership where each learned from the other. The city planner commented,

We all started out as an experiment. The [City] Council loved it [the community exhibition]. The neighborhoods loved it. The energy was palpable. It changed the conversation. But, the project is difficult to measure. We know it was a success, but the success is intangible. For future projects, we need to show tangible success.

This quest for more evidence of the value of the project originated from the head of the planning department, who needed to justify staff time and resources. Thus, the city looked for less “softer” work products and for outcomes that could help with limited capacity that the City Planning Department faces. The city wanted more of a “professional/expertise” partnership, although this expectation was hard to achieve as many of the students were just in their first year of study. The city saw the students as an extension of the City Planning Department charged with helping strengthen neighborhood associations. This was problematic since the neighborhood associations often did not trust the city and were unsure about how to “see” the students’ role. In other situations, the neighborhood associations saw the students working for them, in line with Paul Davidoff’s (1965) old but still relevant advocacy theory, and gave the students explicit instructions on whom to contact in the community, how to draw neighborhood boundary lines, and what they wanted the city to know.

All of this created a great laboratory for understanding the dynamics of planning history and theory in practice while providing great material for reflection, but it muddled the balance between community and student objectives. That said, the project and community response did give the city’s planning director enough confidence in the partnership to approve future projects and to allocate more staff time to coordinating and collaborating with students with the goal of drawing on the third sector to create capacity and direct resources towards city directives.

Conversations with the Art and History Department yielded a different reaction in that it expressed that the project helped convey the “importance of memory and of neighborhoods” but they were concerned about project logistics, including project management issues, limited preparation time, and the inability to transfer the data collected by the students to the department, creating a “loss of institutional memory for the City.” It suggested a more comprehensive arrangement where the students work with the city over a yearlong period to address different project elements in a robust way, which has its trade-offs with regard to the student experience and with having to turn down opportunities to work with different communities in the region. What made the assessment of the Arts and History Department impressive is that the city took ownership over student learning and offered ways to improve the student experience, which, of course, also meant more robust outcomes of impact from its vantage point. For example, it suggested that the students should not be designing the exhibition themselves but should learn how to work with a designer in a way that was more befitting to real-world dynamics. While the mechanics were problematic, the Arts and History Department was “ecstatic” with the project because it “connected planning with art and history” and used its exhibition space as a place for conversation, rather than just a place to view work as an outsider. Further, student interaction with neighborhoods gave the Arts and History Department a different perspective and “opened their eyes” to a number of different areas of concern, including the politics of “voice” in the exhibition, which resembled attributes associated with the two-way and mutually beneficial partnership discussed above.

What we realized is that the ICPC is far more high-profile than other community projects undertaken in single courses. The expectations are higher because the product is exhibited outside of the safe surrounding of the university campus, it involves larger projects with more students and visibility, and it is clear to the client that our goal is to build planning capacity, not purely provide an instructional environment. By actively going into the community and showing work, students become agents of the university rather than students doing a class project on a community topic. Thus, as our director noted, “There are different expectations for student work when they are in a public space. There has to be more quality control.”

Table 2 shows that as a third-sector planner, the Department, including both faculty and students, contributed significant financial, technical, and human resources to the community totaling $70,000 over the course of a single year.⁶ This investment to create capacity resulted in a number of different work products and deliverables from creating high-profile community exhibitions and building websites to developing evidence-based policy briefs and recommendations for equity planning. More often than not, our role as third-sector planners is to quickly help, work on projects that staff cannot, and provide basic but essential information to help build planning capacity within organizations and institutions. These are all basic services and not at the cutting edge of planning, although it is cutting edge for our community. As with planning in general, the question remains how this information will be used in the long term or if it will at all. We have seen community partners change their planning approach or focus as a result of these projects whether through focusing on equity issues or being able to move more quickly on a dream project because of the resources the Department provided. At the same time, we are still in the stage of providing “proof of concept” where the community is convinced it gets more out of ICPC than just serving as a laboratory for students.

Table 2.

Summary of Impacts on Community.

	Greenbelt	Neighborhoods	Hagerman Valley
Contribution:
Financial	$20,000	$30,000	$20,000
Hours	400	600	400
Technology	iPads	GIS	Wordpress
	SurveyGizmo software
Direct	Report Policy brief Presentation for Parks Commission Presentation for River Commission Presentation to community	Report Month-long exhibition Neighborhood outreach	Report Website

Student Outcomes

A year-end focus group led by an external instructional consultant combined with an estimated thirty reflection papers about the ICPC showed that the ICPC either introduced and/or furthered advancement of eight of the department learning outcomes. For example, both community projects applied theory to practice in an intermountain western community, rural and urban, where students were required to take the methods courses and used interviews, surveys, spatial analysis, and historical inquiry to collect data and analyze them. Students experienced different ways to communicate to different audiences, whether it was blogging about the experiences and data collected, writing more traditional reports, or curating an exhibition attended by over five hundred people. Students also developed the ability to consider appropriateness by looking within the context of the community through looking at neighborhood-downtown dynamics, rural regional economic development, or green corridors as both parks and transportation byways.

Of all the learning outcomes, communication, data skills, and evolutionary knowledge of planning practice and theory seemed to be the areas where students felt they experienced the most academic progress, particularly in communicating to parks and recreation leaders the ethical issues that were paramount in how trails were used, or in understanding how the city’s treatment of the neighborhood reflected or contrasted with patterns similar in the history of neighborhood planning. It is this feedback that allows us to conclusively argue that the ICPC was a meaningful practice and that it created the space to make explicit connections between the theory-based classes and the methods courses with a reflection component to talk about the meaning of such experiences and how it would affect and shape their planning careers. For example, students during the second project expressed confusion over whether their client was the city or the individual neighborhoods and how that mirrored different debates in planning over structure versus agency, advocacy planning versus neutral planning, communicative processes versus traditional work products, and so on. In another example, students expressed dismay over developing a traditional policy report because they felt it was not a democratic product that could benefit the neighborhoods but remained purely an instrument of public policy rather than a change agent for creating planning interest or capacity at the neighborhood level.

However, this positive picture of student growth driven by departmental learning objectives does not tell the whole story. Even though students saw the value of an integrated core combination, they actively championed for the dissolution of the ICPC through the academic year. Their concerns and sometimes outright hostility centered around five key issues. First, students thought the projects were far too cumbersome and not compatible with a semester-long endeavor. Part of this reaction stemmed from their belief that they did not have the skills (whether data- or project management–based) that would help them create high-quality work products. Second, they expressed significant concern that the required attention and resources forced them to allocate more time to the core sequence than their other courses, which undercut their desire for a broad based set of skills. Third, a small contingent argued that they had no interested in becoming fluent in western, or Idaho-specific projects, and were concerned they were making themselves less marketable. Those who did want to work locally were concerned that working on politically sensitive projects would make them less appealing over how they would be perceived by the planning community and potential employers. Fourth, they argued that the ICPC did not align with the realities of the student experience, which made for significant confusion between and within classes. One of the more common critiques centered on student distribution between classes in that some students were only taking one of courses, which made it difficult to delegate tasks and share responsibilities. Finally, students voiced concerns that their individual education was at risk because the department seemed to prioritize marketing the department through these community projects, which did not align with student learning outcomes. Overall, it is unclear if the students believe that the value of the ICPC, as expressed through assessing department learning outcomes, outweighs the conflict of course design and student expectations.

Faculty Outcomes

One of the bigger concerns was whether our department had the capacity and resources to implement the ICPC and to adapt it based on feedback expressed by community members and students. This intensive teaching environment requires faculty members to give up control over their own syllabi and to tailor it to meet the community project at hand while still meeting the learning objectives of individual courses. Faculty members cannot build the experiment on their own, but the intervention requires ongoing meetings and checks and balances to coordinate three syllabuses to make sure that students are getting the skills they need in each in order to accomplish the community project. On the advantage front, the experience has provided faculty with immersive pedagogical training, which has strengthened their teaching skills. In addition, it has made the planning core stronger due to the constant deliberation about how to move the courses forward together to achieve the intended outcome. On the disadvantage front, the ICPC can only succeed if all faculty members involved with the ICPC are fully committed to the time and resources it takes. The first year was made easier by a curriculum grant that bought out a course for each instructor, but that will be difficult in future years where this kind of support is absent. This is a nonconventional, time-consuming method of teaching that is poorly understood by the university administration and thus gives faculty misdirection about directing their energies. Finally, faculty members are not trained in how to control the client in such a constant interaction similar to a design studio and the clients have little idea about what the limitations and needs are of these projects within the setting of a one-semester course.

The other issue is how to institutionalize the ICPC so that the path towards implementation every semester is fluid and does not need to be reinvented or reimagined to create efficiencies (Baum 2000). Part of this is to figure out how to accommodate change (Woerkum, Aarts, and Herzele 2011) and flexibility within the process, which needs to be conveyed to the students, faculty members, and community partners. And, that this accommodation should not be seen as a failure of planning but as feature of planning. In part, it requires each faculty member to have a solid foundation in teaching pedagogy and philosophy.

Discussion and Lessons Learned

Faculty, with advisement from university curriculum experts, used feedback and assessment to revise the ICPC for 2014–2015 academic year. The first change is that the responsibility for the community project is now assigned to a single course rather than both courses equally. This makes assessment of learning outcomes easier, makes it clearer for students what is required in each course, and gives clear responsibility for the community project to one faculty member. In addition, we made the two courses corequirements, which means that students have to be enrolled in both courses at the same time. Initially, we thought that it would be fine to have some students taking one of the two courses. We assumed that there would be some trickle-down effect from the other students and that even those who only took one course would still benefit from the ICPC. It became clear that the difference in time commitment to the research project was an impediment to the project and a source of frustration among the students. Another change from the original ICPC is that we are now seeing the two “general planning knowledge” courses and the two “planning skills” courses as more closely connected. In other words, while the original ICPC model was solely focused on connections between courses offered in the same semester (vertical integration), we are now also making connections between courses in different semesters (horizontal integration). This horizontal integration is helping reinforce skills that students learned in previous semesters and is helping us visualize to students how knowledge and skills building is staggered throughout the curriculum. We are in the process of “building out” the experience and now have two projects running each semester beginning in Fall 2014.

Beyond these easy administrative and logistical modifications, we uncovered several more difficult and complicated issues that we need to address not only as a department but also as a profession. These issues fall in four broad categories, which we will discuss: communicating the value of ICPC to nontraditional students, the choice of projects, the comprehensive assessment of outcomes, and meeting faculty needs.

Communicating ICPC’s Value to Nontraditional Students

Student assessments show some recognition of the ICPC’s value even amidst their resistance to it. Our burden is to demonstrate that the ICPC creates more or perhaps different value than a single course. We believe that the students’ perception that the ICPC “got in the way” of their needed education is in part due to cohort attributes. It is likely that our student makeup, mostly nontraditional, part-time students, influences the success of the ICPC. We recognized that “full integration,” as laid out in our curriculum grant, may simply not be possible due to the work/personal demands of our students. Our student base, strongly focused on job placement, is interested in collecting concrete marketable skills. The students do not buy into the rhetoric of the value of critical thinking, good writing, and leadership; they simply look at job ads for entry-level planning positions and want to make sure that they acquire the skills that are required for these jobs. In addition, the changes pushed by leaders of universities (e.g., graduation rates, FTEs) and by pedagogical experts who champion new methods for learning do not align well with our students, who are much more traditional in their learning methods and have to deal with other pressing issues outside the classroom. In other words, our ICPC concept, reflective of innovative teaching models, does not necessarily match or align with our student body.

We are currently coming up with strategies to draw explicit connections between the curriculum and market demands. In some ways, we have treated the ICPC intervention as a buffet where projects are isolated and have little connection between semesters. After reviewing the assessment data, we see the need to consider how to use the ICPC as a pathway where we help the students build on skills and knowledge from one semester to the next. The intentionality would further explain to students the connection between planning curriculum and skill-based practice. In part, the ICPC is new, and only included first-year students who had yet to undertake their first year internship requirement, and thus we may need to track or survey whether their job experiences influenced their perspectives of the ICPC. One way to do so is to bring in different planning firms and agencies to talk about job placement and expected skills. But we also need to do greater and more refined assessment of students after they have graduated to see how the ICPC influenced their ability to find their first planning job and have a successful career.

Negotiating Projects to Avoid Mission Drift

The department’s mission is to increase community capacity, but we need to avoid taking on community projects that are not central to our student’s learning or do not fit with the ICPC even though the department is performing as a third-sector planner. Many communities have expressed interest in partnering in an ICPC project either in one-off or multisemester collaborations. This brings both advantages and disadvantages particularly in determining how to select appropriate projects for students and create a fair and equitable system for the selection of communities that we provide assistance to. Part of this negotiation and to ensure mission alignment is a clear dialogue with our community partners who express a desire to work with the university but in a resource-contained manner. In line with Reardon’s (2006) and Winkler’s (2013) experience, our department needs to do a better job of articulating partnership parameters and expectations on both sides in terms of interaction, assessment, and resources.

Comprehensive Assessment of Outcomes

It has become clear that innovation in teaching does not fit with regular metrics of assessment either from the university level or from PAB. Universities are concerned with students/faculty ratios, graduation rates, and enrollment numbers as clearly articulated in zero budgeting and program prioritization. An intensive curriculum, despite its connection to engagement and outreach, is often seen as waste of resources or a luxury that should not be taken. The beauty of the ICPC, which requires smaller, aligned classes to make the project and student learning work, does not align with such expectations despite its innovative nature. Planning research is also complicit in that pedagogy research is seen as a secondary or tertiary line of inquiry, while a faculty member’s academic worth is deemed by the number of articles written and the quality of journals publishing her or his work. While all of this is necessary for academic life in some ways, it makes it difficult to help plan for communities that need greater capacity. Therefore, we need to build a robust set of outcome assessments that are institutionalized within the department, and establish procedures that help us translate this assessment in productivity measures that are acceptable for university administrators. In addition, this assessment should meet PAB outcomes assessment criteria. Table 3 shows our first attempt to provide an assessment that focuses on our mission to increase local planning capacity in addition to student learning outcomes. The table shows that the ICPC has been very effective in extending our teaching from the classroom into the community. Just in the first three projects, one of which has just started, we reached over one hundred professionals and elected officials as well as about six hundred residents. However, we also need to think more about how to demonstrate and assess that planning capacity has actually increased in measurable ways by collecting more robust data from our partners. While these are very encouraging results and show our progress towards our mission of increasing planning capacity, they do not show up on the university’s productivity spreadsheet in the form of FTEs. It is also not clear how PAB will accept this as a valid approach to measure or progress towards our mission.

Table 3.

Assessment of Community Impact.

	Audience reached					Outcomes
Client and project	Course	Students	Professionals	Community	Details	Products	Results
Boise Department of Parks and Recreation:	501505	14 15	56	40	Parks and Rec Staff (4)Parks and Rec Committee (9)River Management Committee (21)Volunteers (40)ID APA Conference (22)	Survey report to CityUrban Research Brief (500+ downloads)Presentation at ID APA ConferencePresentation for Parks and Rec CommissionPresentation for River Management CommissionPresentation for Community in Sesqui ShopTraining for Volunteers	New Greenbelt MapChange to annual iPad surveyNew content on diversity and demographicsFollow up project:$19,000 Research Project$3,000 ContractData used in City’s grant applicationsStories on local news stationsNPR InterviewNPR Story on Web
Greenbelt user analysis	501505	14 15	56	40
Boise Department of Planning/Development and Arts/History:	500504	10 16	6+	500+	Staff from City (6)Members of 3 Neighborhood AssociationsID APA Conference (60)Exhibit visitors (500+)	Policy ReportExhibit in Sesqui ShopPresentation at Fettuccine ForumPresentation at 2015 National APAPoster at ID APAExhibit Facebook Page	Rethinking role of Neighborhood AssociationsFollow-up project:Creation of City’s first Cultural PlanInforming city’s later livability initiatives
Neighborhood study	500504	10 16	6+	500+
Southwest Idaho Tourism:Hagerman Valley economic development strategy	503511	11 13	38	32	Economic development professionals (15)Faith-based leaders (2)Hagerman Mayor and City Council (5)Buhl Mayor and Chamber of Commerce (3)Idaho Department of Commerce (3)Southwest Idaho Tourism (2)County Commissioners (5)Local Business Owners (30)	Presentation for Southwest Idaho TourismReport to Southwest Idaho TourismPresentation for regional Chamber of Commerce	Rethinking of Way FindingRethinking of the role of Tourism WebpageOffering new digital concepts for marketing and tourism

Balancing the Schism between Faculty Research and Practice

The introduction of the ICPC represents an intensive initiative that requires significant investment and resources by faculty members that sometimes create uncomfortable conditions. Individual faculty members no longer have full control over their syllabi or their course planning, which raises issues about the loss of academic freedom. It requires faculty to frequently update their syllabi to make sure that the students are getting the material they need to support community projects beyond the regular or more traditional course materials. Faculty must negotiate their work and schedule planning with colleagues. ICPC not only requires levels of assessment that go beyond traditional student evaluations, it also requires some sharing of individual course evaluations. In theory, while an open model of exchange makes sense, it is difficult to implement particularly when it has yet to be institutionalized.

Part of the challenge in securing faculty buy-in for the ICPC stems from the fact that most of the work that happens at our community level is not at the cutting edge of publishable planning inquiry. Capacity building work makes it clear how disconnected academics are from places that are en vogue because of the problems they have and/or the solutions they have designed. This disconnect has implications for faculty career mobility and project prestige. To overcome this bias, we hope to create a new line of work that centers on communities in a comparable context that are experiencing problems that, while perhaps not cutting-edge, are planning issues that need to be addressed. At a practical level, we need to create administrative systems within the department to make it easier to implement the ICPC every semester now that the course buy-out has expired, which is something that we are currently testing in Spring 2015.

Conclusion

The department developed the ICPC model as one way to fulfill its role as a third-sector planner. This study shows that the ICPC model provides an opportunity to develop a core curriculum that reflects and reinforces a community-driven mission. We developed, implemented, and assessed the ICPC model that seeks to serve this purpose through our planning core curriculum. Such an approach stems from our desire to support our low-resourced community that is experiencing planning issues it is ill-equipped to handle independently. The ICPC is a way to institutionalize the mission within the student and community experiment and offers a new approach to think about teaching. While it is not a model that suits everyone, it is an avenue for bottom-up curriculum building. Its first year of testing has shown that the ICPC has given value-added to our students and community members, but it needs more refinement to take into account the different criticisms leveled by our different partners and students.

In some ways, our efforts are a reaction to the increased globalization of planning. While it is important for us to be part of the broader conversations happening elsewhere and how to understand global forces wherever they occur, it is equally important to consider how we can approach planning issues in places that have largely been understudied but are experiencing rapid change when looking at a different set of indicators. We teach our students the cutting edge of planning, but in reality this is not the situation of many places that have limited capacity or a different set of issues. In part, this model creates an avenue for extending the relationship between planning education and practice to planning education, practice, and community engagement. We feel that PAB’s new accreditation focus on mission gives us the opportunity to do so although the criteria do not look at context of the community in which the department is rooted. In the end, the challenge for our department is how to meet our mission to increase local planning capacity while providing a quality education to our students and satisfying the increasing demands for accountability from the university administration and accrediting bodies.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments as well as Susan Mason, Thomas Wuerzer, and Penghu Zhu for their involvement in the ICPC project. Thanks to Susan Shadle and Andrew Goodman from Boise State University’s Center for Teaching and Learning for their guidance in designing and assessing our curriculum.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The development of the ICPC was made possible by a grant from Boise State University.

Notes

Author Biographies

Amanda Johnson Ashley is an assistant professor in Community and Regional Planning at Boise State University. Her research explores urban revitalization and land use change through political mobilization and civic engagement.

Jaap Vos is an associate professor and the head of the Planning Department at Boise State University. His research interest is in planning within the context of the American West and the role of universities in increasing planning capacity.

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