- What do planners do? Define Your Discipline to drive undergraduate curriculum renewal    538 kb by    Basson, Marita | marita.basson@usq.edu.au    Short Outline What should planning schools teach? To answer this question they require a good understanding of the roles that current and future graduates will undertake in an ever-changing world. This paper describes how the Define Your Discipline Stakeholder Consultation Process was used to develop a Graduate Capability Framework for planning programs. Abstract Planners are getting jobs that did not exist a decade ago or jobs that were not considered to be part of the planning discipline, for example: writing climate change policy for a local authority, assessing development loans for property developers, finding sites for hard infrastructure of energy companies (Coiacetto, Jones, & Jackson, 2011). Recent planning education literature also suggests that planning schools are failing to adequately equip students for the roles they will undertake in practice. One symptom of the hiatus between curriculum and practice is the leakage of talented professionals to other fields of employment. It is therefore not surprising that there is an ongoing debate in Australia about what should be taught in planning schools and the core skills planners require (Budge 2009; Hamnett, 1999 cited by Miller et al.,2011). So, how should planning schools decide where the emphasis should lie in their programs when both the breadth and depth of the planning profession continue to change as the profession responds to the needs of urban and regional communities in an ever-changing world? And, what priorities should be given to: technical planning skills (e.g. statutory knowledge, strategic planning and urban design skills, computerised modelling); to the ‘softer’ non-technical generic skills (e.g. communication, conflict resolution, project management, leadership); to the emerging fields (e.g. social planning, economic planning, transport planning); and to the wicked problems such as climate change, population growth, sustainability, and food security (Budge 2009, Hurlimann 2009 cited by Miller et al., 2011)? Some authors (Baum, et al., 2010; Miller, et al., 2011) have suggested that when deciding what to include in their degree programs, planning schools should start with the question: What knowledge, skills and abilities do planning graduates need to pursue a rewarding and successful career as a planning practitioner? This paper describes how the simple, but elegant, Define Your Discipline (DYD) Stakeholder Consultation Process (Dowling and Hadgraft 2013a) was used during a Planning Institute Australia (PIA) sponsored pilot study in Queensland to answer that question. The DYD Process is an efficient, effective, and inclusive consultation process that can be used by a discipline to define a Graduate Capability Framework for a program in their discipline. It is designed to capture the views of all relevant stakeholders (such as practitioners, recent graduates, and academics) about the tasks a graduate will undertake in their first few years of practice. Since 2010 the DYD Process has been used to define Capability Frameworks in six disciplines and at two different program levels, for example environmental engineering (Dowling and Hadgraft 2013b). A common, but unexpected, feature of the Capability Frameworks developed to date is the importance of Process Capabilities, such as investigation, development assessment and design, in the practice of a discipline. Consequently, Process Capabilities have been included as one of the four dimensions of the Frameworks, which are: Generic Capabilities; Process Capabilities; Technical Capabilities; and Practice Contexts. During 2012, the DYD Process was used to develop a draft Graduate Capability Framework for planning degree programs. The capabilities were based on data gathered during six DYD Workshops: three in Brisbane, two in Toowoomba and one in Cairns at the PIA Queensland Conference. Forty two people participated in the study and more than six hundred data sets were gathered. The paper reports on the results of the consultations, the development of the draft Graduate Capability Framework, and how the Framework may be used to inform the review of program curriculum. An interim report (Dowling & Basson, 2013) on the pilot study has been forwarded to PIA recommending that the DYD Planning Project should be extended so that it becomes a national study. Keywords Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2013: Frontiers of Planning - Evolving and declining models of city planning practice   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper