The Epistemography of Urban and Regional Planning

Bagley, Elizabeth & Shaffer, DW (2010). The epistemography or urban and regional planning 912: Appropriation in the face of resistance. Paper to be presented at the International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS), Chicago, Illinois.

http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/Bagley-ICLS2010-submitted.doc

Preparing citizens to address the complex problems inherent in cities requires our changing society to embrace a new kind of education. One way to train people to think about complex problems is to identify and study how professionals who think in those ways develop their epistemic frame. In this paper, we examine one of the ways urban planners master and appropriate relevant expertise through an ethnographic study of an urban planning practicum. Specifically, we use a new method called epistemic network analysis to look at presentation feedback sessions during two weeks of the practicum to explore emergent relationships between the teacher’s planning expertise and the students’ expertise. The results of this study indicate that epistemic network analysis offers a technique for analyzing the kinds of situated understanding that result from sociocultural learning and for observing the translation of pedagogy into practice in various types of learning environments.