Calling On,Out,and In: Toward a Critical Pedagogy for Participatory Planning

Starting Points

Our starting points include a literature review and an informal scan of how public participation is taught at accredited programs in Canada and the United States. The authors’ experiences of teaching public participation in both countries are also a critical resource. Across the three of us, we have taught public participation to students in planning, public policy, and public administration at various levels (undergraduate and graduate) across multiple institutions, and in diverse social, political, and physical landscapes. We also draw on our involvement in a workshop on participatory planning pedagogy.

Teaching Participation as Technique

Numerous models and frameworks for conducting public participation have been developed through careful study of practice (Hofer and Kaufmann 2023; Nabatchi and Leighninger 2015; Schively Slotterback and Lauria 2019). Scholars and practitioners offer strategies for determining whether participation is merited (Hurlbert and Gupta 2015), designing participatory processes to suit purpose (Bryson et al. 2013), mediating among conflicting interests (Forester 2006), collecting and collating input from the public (Eriksson, Fredriksson, and Syssner 2021), utilizing social media and mobile technologies to promote participation (Afzalan and Muller 2018), and evaluating outcomes (Rowe and Frewer 2000). The prevalence of such “how-to” guidance is associated with growing efforts to provide a recognizable standard for public participation (Legacy et al. 2023) and streamline its implementation through planning technology. Both these efforts create challenges for teaching public participation.

Technology is saturating every corner of planning practice (Wilson and Tewdwr-Jones 2021), and now planners use information and communications technologies for all phases of planning work, from data gathering and analysis to plan production and, increasingly, public participation (Potts and Webb 2023). This long co-evolution of practice and technology reached its pinnacle with the Covid-19 pandemic when planning became a universally digital practice (Milz and Gervich 2021; Milz, Pokharel, and Gervich 2023). One of the confounding experiences of this period was that planners were prepared for the change (Milz, Pokharel, and Gervich 2023; Mualam et al. 2022), perhaps because most students come to planning school with a predilection for using technology (Boland et al. 2025). Most students learn about planning technology (plan-tech) first in analytical planning methods courses, such as in quantitative analysis and geographic information science, in which a primary focus is learning how to operate software.

We assert that teaching participatory planning techniques in a similarly decontextualized manner, without critical perspectives, is not the most effective way to learn when and how to use and adapt these methods. Yet acquiring techniques is valuable because they are useful. After all, the impetus for professionalization is to promote the consistent application of high-quality practices. However, to the extent that participation methodologies are being bureaucratized and institutionalized (Legacy 2017) through a cookbook approach, they also come with risks. Leaning into technique to emphasize process efficiency may eliminate meaningful dissent (Pokharel, Milz, and Gervich 2021). Focusing on mastering techniques or “best practices” invites a loss of context-specificity (Legacy et al. 2023), reducing participatory planning skills to a kind of expert knowledge that overwrites local knowledge and other ways of knowing. Instead, alongside learning concrete tools and methods, practitioners need to develop the reflective capacity to adapt them to fit the unique circumstances of each context (Quick and Sandfort 2014).

Teaching Participation as a Critical Philosophy of Inclusion

To the extent that participatory planning serves as a container for planning as usual, it is a practice that reproduces structural inequality, re-traumatizes equity-seeking groups, and reinforces Whiteness as a form of power that flattens experiences against a single hegemonic frame of reference. When we recognize participation as a means of both exclusion and inclusion of non-dominant groups (Quick and Feldman 2011), it becomes even more important to question established methods of teaching and conducting participatory planning. Scholarship has pointed to the detrimental effects on inclusion and decision-making outcomes of overwriting differences in culture, language, norms, and power dynamics (de Souza Briggs 1998; Umemoto 2001). Teaching participatory planning as a critical philosophy of inclusion is crucial within the context of ongoing struggles to call out and challenge racism within planning (Bates et al. 2018; Williams 2024), recognize planning’s implication in colonialism (Escobar 2010), and promote Indigenous justice (Porter and Barry 2016). It requires resetting the space of planning engagement to move beyond “including” Indigenous people in White-centered spaces to respect their inherent sovereignty and rights to set the agendas (Porter and Barry 2016; Porter et al. 2017). It demands recognizing Black placemaking history and methods (Bates et al. 2018) and actively decentering Whiteness in public engagement settings (Quick 2024).

More critical sensibilities toward power are difficult to capture and learn from a technique-focused pedagogy. Engaging pluriversal methods of community engagement is a way to minimize speaking “on” or “for” communities and instead to plan with them or cede space for planning by them through listening and taking their lead (Vasudevan and Novoa 2022). For example, embracing the role of storytelling in making plans is a tangible expression of decolonization (Ortiz 2023). However, much of the critique of the damage done by participatory planning is learned through theory classes. Sharing stories of oppression and cautionary tales about power abuse and complexity in a classroom is essential and can give the students the foundations to “call out” inappropriate and damaging processes. Yet it may never adequately prepare prospective practitioners for encountering oppression directly in practice because they are not reckoning with these tensions by working through the nitty gritty, practical choices of how to implement planning. Once on the job, students may struggle to bridge the gap as they attempt to apply concepts from one set of lessons with practices from another, or be too anxious to even try participatory methods.

Calling on

Teaching participation as technique is a method of calling on students to have an understanding of what it means and how it feels to be the person designing and leading a participatory process using different tools. This aim can be translated into learning objectives that seek to expose students to techniques and long-standing principles for designing effective public participation. Part of their training needs to include sensitizing them to the various participatory tools available, including emerging technologies, as well as developing their capacity to consider the merits and limitations of each and make context-specific choices that are also highly attentive to issues of equity, diversity, inclusion, and justice.

Pedagogies of calling on include reading materials, case studies, and practical exercises that expose students to methods for designing and facilitating community engagement. In our classrooms we include short hands-on activities to demonstrate and practice facilitating a discussion or to gain exposure to common participatory tools (e.g., dotmocracy, affinity diagrams, world cafe, circle process), as well as some longer activities on how to do a stakeholder analysis or thematically organize the qualitative information generated through participatory processes. Students need to be supported to learn in and on participation as a relative newcomer, meaning that they need to be put in situations where they can apply established participatory tools and techniques while recognizing that the work of being a planner engaged in participatory processes is as much of a stance of ongoing design, reflection, and adaptation as it is the application of specific skills. Community-based partnerships and studios, we suggest, will continue to be valuable tools for teaching students how to engage in co-production. But, for planner-convened participation, there is a need to get students as close to actual community engagement practice as possible without using communities as a “lab” for testing their skills (Schramm and Nye 1999, cited by Reardon 2006). Instructors also need to create “safety nets” so that students can be permitted to fail and develop the reflective capacity and habit to question the field’s existing practices and their own professional habits. We expand on this idea below, as reflection is also an integral element of a pedagogy of calling in.

To assess students’ learning and preparation to be “called in” to practice, we have shifted emphasis away from simply demonstrating proficiency in a technique and toward their ability to contextualize, adapt, and mix specific skills or particular forms of knowledge to suit a given purpose and context. For example, Janice uses an assignment where students design a public participation strategy to respond to a specific scenario. Kathy does something similar in her course, allowing students to design something relevant to their professional work and, in a separate document, to justify their choice of techniques, steps, and sequencing relative to the process objectives and parameters. These assignment structures normalize the idea that there is no “right” way to “do” public participation, but rather a whole series of judgment calls practitioners make when engaging with communities.

Calling out

In parallel with the popular meaning of “calling out” or interventions that name and interrupt harmful or oppressive power relations, the approach we describe as calling out is a method of teaching public participation so that students can both have critical theories and frameworks to identify the myriad ways that public participation may have negative impacts and recognize their own potential complicity in reproducing those dynamics in their own practice. We draw inspiration from scholars who offer strategies for convenors and facilitators of public participation processes to not only name, but also avoid, minimize, or attempt to remedy exclusionary and oppressive power dynamics (de Souza Briggs 1998; Umemoto 2001).

Exposure to critical theories is an essential activity in pedagogies of calling out. Exposure to theories of democracy, community organizing, organizations, and group dynamics provides students with frameworks for observing, reflecting on, and challenging participatory practices (Hoch 2017). Attuning students to power dynamics requires engagement with theories of anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and other dynamics of prejudice. We suggest this needs to be an explicit part of teaching about participation, integrated alongside learning participatory techniques, rather than siloed in a separate theory class. Essentially, students need to learn to “call out” themselves in their own participatory planning work, when merited, without going so far as to “cancel” themselves when they err, and to learn to act with sustained attention to power and equity that keeps them attuned without paralyzing them from any action at all.

Course content and modules to engage with these issues include revisiting themes around diverse ways of knowing (Sandercock 1998) previously introduced in planning theory courses, this time making explicit connections to participatory practice. Janice added a lecture and case study on trauma-based approaches to public participation. Dan uses video recordings of facilitated planning meetings, stopping them at key moments for discussion around questions such as, “What do you think about what that planner just said or did? What would you do next?” which is an opportunity to call out what planners are—and are not—doing, propose alternative actions, and compare their choices with the actions of seasoned professionals. Toronto workshop participants used related methods for “trying on” different planning decisions in a safer, simulated environment through role-playing, perspective-taking, or modifications of Forester’s (2012) model of learning through other practitioners’ stories of practice. Some also teach arts-based methods for participation, a pluriversal approach to planning discussed by Vasudevan and Novoa (2022).

However, students should not be attuned to the complex power dynamics solely through a position of critical distance and observational and analytical learning activities. It is also vital for them to have a structured experience in which they encounter and work with these dynamics in practice, and in a low-stakes environment where they are not so concerned about the risks that they are hesitant to act at all. This is essential to teaching emerging practitioners to use the given public participation techniques with care and sensitivity and to think beyond them. This kind of “imagining otherwise” (Bates et al. 2018) is part of challenging the Whiteness and coloniality of the formal spaces of public participation. Kathy leads students in a conversation about a contemporary racialized planning issue, such as gentrification of immigrant neighborhoods or policing on university campuses, using Glenn Singleton’s protocol for courageous conversations about race. White students find the protocol useful for raising their self-awareness of their own racialized positionality in planning topics, the class has the opportunity to try out and critique one way to engage in racialized policy deliberations. ⁴ Anytime power relations are particularly salient in the course of classroom discussions, the instructor can say, ‘Time out, let’s unpack this issue.’ However, while there are times in participatory settings when it is constructive to call out and immediately shut down a harmful dynamic, shame is not helpful to learning. An educational space can become stifling if people feel on edge about being called out for missteps, suggesting that extra care may be needed to ensure that students appreciate the difference between safety and comfort (Barry et al. 2023). It is for precisely this reason that we have added calling in as the third mode of teaching and learning participatory planning.

Calling in

To “call in” is to note issues of power or problematic practices and actions and to invite the individual(s) involved into a conversation to discuss the impact of those actions, to challenge biases or assumptions respectfully, and to engage in working together on the issue (Verduzco-Baker 2018). It is a stance of inviting students and instructors to be active agents of developing inclusive and empowering approaches to participatory planning, by recognizing every moment of engagement, including the classroom environment itself, as a space ripe for constructive engagement with and transformation of power relationships.

A core pedagogical activity of calling in involves sustaining and building the stamina to remain attentive and engaged and not take—or expect—a pass on shared responsibility for an environment that actively promotes inclusion and equity. Community-engaged and studio-based learning are well-established methods for calling in students, but they are particularly demanding for students and faculty alike because of the responsibility of preventing harm. Coaching and course correction may be difficult to achieve when community partners are in the room, so multiple channels and iteration are needed. We instead prefer to expand on our earlier suggestion to intentionally and thoughtfully frame the classroom as a space of learning “in”/“on” participation, inspired by Schön’s (1983) influential work on reflective practice. Planners (and others) learn most effectively through engagement in action, reflection on that experience and its lessons for practice, and ongoing application of those lessons. As Schön emphasizes, skilled practice requires observation and adaptation in real time. The classroom is an environment for this practice, provided educators exercise opportunities to call in students to be co-producers of that space, including by encouraging students to call in the instructor, who can take responsibility and model humility in taking in guidance, learning, and adapting accordingly.

We have attempted to achieve this by structuring our classes so that students take turns practicing their skills in designing, implementing, and evaluating participatory processes, while being coached and supported by the instructor in these methodologies. They practice the skills in the classroom with their peers playing the roles of participating stakeholders. Kathy expands on this practice by introduces students to the uneven distribution of power that exists in many participatory processes in which those who are most likely to experience harm because of their identities also tend to be burdened with the labor of educating others, which only serves to replicate the harm (Linder et al. 2015). Kathy then uses Glenn Singleton’s courageous conversations about race to get students to consider how much “courage” they need to raise issues of race when practicing different facilitation skills and public participation techniques. Throughout the class, privileged students practice a stance of not demanding explanations of less privileged students, recognizing their positionality, taking responsibility for their own learning, and sustaining their stamina for ongoing adaptation and growth.

One of the workshop participants shared an example at her university where trained actors are used to simulate a contentious public meeting. ⁵ Students prepare for the simulation by learning the rules of order that guide public meetings and attending meetings with their peers and instructor. They then take turns as the planner facilitating the meeting while actors play the roles of key stakeholders. The instructor is responsible for initiating and terminating the simulation when students require regrouping or when specific incidents or interactions during the simulation necessitate additional discussion. While many educators will not have access to trained actors to run this kind of simulation, this unique learning approach offers valuable lessons on creating challenging environments for students to practice their skills while maintaining a sense of safety. Students learn essential content beforehand and observe the actions of practicing planners before being asked to try out their developing skills for short periods, with the ability to step in and out of character to engage in personal and group reflection.

When it comes to assessing students’ performance, there is tension in asking students to engage with the messiness of public participation and learn in part by failing when their work is graded. Students may be instrumental when approaching their course assignments, focusing solely on meeting the grading rubric. To encourage students to take risks and embrace some level of discomfort, educators need to assure them that “getting it right” is not the key metric for success. In our classrooms, we employ reflective activities that we evaluate based on how much a student learns from an experience. This grading approach shifts attention away from simply assessing how well students performed the role of facilitator (which might encourage them to try only things that they are confident will “work”) toward a more holistic assessment of their capacity to learn from their successes and failures. Reflective activities help even the playing field between students who learn more through what Kolb (2015) has described as active experimentation and those who learn through reflective observation, providing opportunities for both types of learners to excel. For instance, Dan selects three students to participate in a role-playing simulation and assigns the remaining students the role of observers (i.e., fishbowl exercise). The role-playing students complete the simulation live and uninterrupted while observers take notes. Afterward, the instructor facilitates a class discussion of the simulation, including the experiences of both participants and observers, as well as the lessons that everyone can apply to their future practice. During in-class simulations, Janice encourages students to take risks and try to adapt so long as they then analyze what did and did not work and why. We also find that there is an equity dimension to this, with students who suffer from social anxiety often being challenged by public participation courses that include hands-on activities. Modes of assessment that deemphasize actual performance, along with clear ground rules and expectations for constructive peer feedback, can support their success. There was considerable interest among the Toronto workshop participants in less instructor-centered approaches, such as peer assessment and “ungrading,” which refers to a range of practices from eliminating grades entirely to only requiring a minimum number of graded assignments (Gorichanaz 2024).

The suggestions in this section regarding possible topics, learning activities, and modes of assessment do warrant a word of caution. Public participation is a broad area of inquiry and practice, and instructors may be tempted to overload their courses with content. As discussed at the Toronto workshops, students are often not well-served by too much course content. There is a need to “go slow to move fast,” meaning that students require time and space to reflect on their developing practice and gain confidence.