The value of service-learning in planning's educative processes: A case study of Johannesburg’s street-based children

Abstract

Not only is our country in search of a better paradigm of governance in the face of economic recession, urban migration, social movement, and new policies towards multicultural, race and gender equality, so too is the profession of planning in a state of dynamism. We, the academy, are thus responsible to equip our budding practitioners with the skills and know-how of working in environments of accelerated socio-economic change so that they may achieve active citizenship. To foster such know-how we need to embrace a social learning tradition by expanding our institutionalised definitions of knowledge practices to include a qualitative pedagogy of "experimental, intuitive, and local knowledges based on practices of talking, listening, seeing, contemplating, sharing; knowledges expressed in visual and other symbolic, ritual, and artistic ways ... learning by doing" (Sandercock 1999: 172).