Community Matters: Service-Learning in Engaged Design and Planning

"Community Matters: Service Learning in Design and Planning explores issues that resonate with a diverse group of design and planning educators drawn to the challenge of supporting greater community building and empowerment while combining learning with service. Community Matters explores such questions as:How do we foster mutuality and reciprocity in community-academy partnerships? What conflicts, challenges, limits and obstacles do we face in our service-learning studios and projects? What evidence do we have of our impacts on students and communities and how are we responding? How are we being attentive to the contemporary environmental and societal issues? What is our role as both designers and agents of societal change? How are we innovating to enable greater capacities for individuals, future practitioners and communities? This book provides compelling evidence for the case that educators should be adopting engaged pedagogies like service-learning, engaged research methods like action research, andengaged theories and practices like participatory design, placemaking and deliberative democracy. Together these approaches are mapping a geography of design and planning education, practice and scholarship occurring at the boundary of community and academy. "--