Many instructors have occasion to teach a required course to students who are unconvinced about why they must be there. For me, that course is Introduction to City & Regional Planning: Past and Present. This is a survey of the history of city planning, taught through lectures, discussions and walking tours—all integrated into the typical twice-weekly lecture time slots. The majority of the enrolled students are completing the first semester of their two-year master’s degree in the department of city & regional planning. Teaching a course like this, to a large number of students who might not otherwise have chosen to be there, offers both challenges and opportunities. For example, how can we motivate all students around this required subject? And, does this motivational challenge invite—even, perhaps, require—the opportunity for pedagogical experimentation? By giving students some choice in their work, focusing on why the content matters to them, and taking them seriously as students of history, we aim to make our required course as meaningful to them as possible.

Most students in this course have come to Penn to become professionals in the city planning field. In their first year in the degree program, we require them to gain basic proficiency in statistical methods, Geographic Information Systems and the process of developing a neighborhood plan. Compared to these other areas of their training, planning history may not seem as relevant to their future careers. It would, after all, be the rare job in urban design, community and economic development, transportation planning, property development, environmental planning or smart cities that specifically lists familiarity with planning history as a qualification for the position. 

But the course offers many valuable qualitative skills in reading, writing and critical thinking, alongside substantive knowledge about the development of their chosen field. I aim to help students appreciate all of these, both during their tenure in the course, and later as they progress throughout their careers. 

It is critical to note that I did not develop—and do not teach—this course on my own. My collaborator and co-instructor is Domenic Vitiello, associate professor of city & regional planning and urban studies. In crafting the curriculum together, we have also built upon the work of our colleague Eugenie Birch, Lawrence C. Nussdorf Professor of Urban Research & Education, who developed her own version of the course before us. The course we teach today is the product of all of our successive ideas and experimentation. While the resultant strategies I describe below relate specifically to the teaching of planning history, they should also suggest analogues that could apply to other required courses in different disciplines and for different audiences. 

We have no illusions or aspirations of converting our students to belated history majors. Rather, an overriding goal has been to impart to them the value of history and of historical thinking as a basis for their future-oriented planning work. We hope the course will help them decipher the evolution of planning ideas and understand how those ideas have shaped landscapes and lives when implemented on the ground. We aim to do this in at least three key ways.

First, we aim to help students see the course as more than just a requirement imposed upon them by giving them choices to tailor the experience to their specific interests. Recognizing the students’ varied geographic backgrounds, and also cognizant of the fact that we cannot do justice to both international and US planning history in the space of just one semester, we allow each student to choose either a domestic or comparative international geographic focus at the outset. This drives their subsequent selections of readings and assignments throughout the term. Dividing the material in this way gives students agency in focusing their own deeper investigations within the breadth of the survey format, while also exposing them to portions of both spatial tracks through the lectures. It is particularly relevant for us to offer geographic choice given that roughly a third of our students are foreign-born. Further, our students have diverse goals about where they hope to practice planning one day—practice that begins as early as their second-year studio courses, which are regularly based in a variety of regions and countries. In another course and another department, the appropriate dimensions of choice could take on other forms entirely. 

Second, even though this is a history course, we design the curriculum with students’ largely contemporary urban interests in mind. At multiple points in the semester, we lead the students on guided walking tours of Philadelphia neighborhoods to help them examine the relationships between past plans and contemporary urban conditions. These walking tours also provide our graduate teaching assistants with valuable pedagogical experience in leading what are effectively mobile interactive lectures. By taking students on site, we help to translate a more traditionally classroom-bound subject into an instructional format with which they may be more familiar as planners.

Our students’ aims as contemporary planners also shape the course’s scope and assignments. During the second two- thirds of the semester, our lectures—and those of our colleagues whom we invite to come speak about their current research—bring historical topics up to the present. This helps set the context for an essay assignment in which we require students to trace the history of their specific planning subfield, showing how past practices and ideas relate to the present. The goal throughout is for each student to construct a usable history to take away with them from the course. This is not to suggest that history for non-historians must be presentist in its orientation. Rather, where appropriate, we simply endeavor to make the connections between past and present more visible to students for whom the inherent value of history may seem less obvious. 

Lastly, we aim to give planning students the skills historians use. This means that we introduce historiographical debates on day one, as one would in any graduate history seminar. We also teach the methods of interpreting primary sources throughout the semester. This occurs by example in lectures, followed by hands-on learning through close readings of historical plans, drawings, photographs, maps and contemporary built environments. In this way, we aim to teach not only what happened in history and why, but also how we come to know and understand that history itself. By providing this opportunity for our students to think as historians themselves, we hope they will come to understand history as much more than just a set of facts, but also as an interpretive approach to reconstructing the past. We hope this helps prepare them to contextualize change as it continues across space and time. 

When we offered the first iteration of this course six years ago, it included only a few of the above elements. These curricular designs developed over time, as Professor Vitiello and I responded to student feedback and our own learning objectives to more effectively tailor the subject matter to the interests and needs of our specific students. Similarly, none of these ideas are uniquely appropriate to teaching students in a required course. They represent pedagogical practices that I would apply to teaching a humanities subject to non-majors, to professional degree candidates, and to students more broadly. But I only came to recognize these approaches through the challenge and opportunity of bringing my expertise in urban and planning history to a classroom full of potentially skeptical graduate students.

Francesca Russello Ammon is associate professor of city and regional planning and historic preservation at the Weitzman School of Design.

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This essay continues the series that began in the fall of 1994 as the joint creation of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Lindback Society for Distinguished Teaching. 

See https://almanac.upenn.edu/talk-about-teaching-and-learning-archive for previous essays.