Feminization of the urban planning discipline: developing a gender responsive pedagogy at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran

ABSTRACT

With the increasing number of female students enrolling and graduating from the Department of Urbanism at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran, this study aims to mainstream gender into urban planning pedagogy. This is achieved by analyzing a case study comprising 47 survey responses and seven follow-up interviews. Among other factors, respondents’ perspectives on gender are more influenced by their personal experiences rather than the objective knowledge acquired through the Department’s curriculum. Recommendations for the department to mainstream gender into the pedagogy are (1) mainstreaming gender issues in urban planning curriculum, (2) promoting gender-balanced department climate, (3) innovating around teaching methods, and (4) increasing awareness about the profession.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender mainstreaming
• urban planning pedagogy
• Iran
• Ferdowsi University of Mashhad

Acknowledgement

We wish to express our appreciation for the participants of online survey and the roundtable discussion for providing valuable inputs for this research. We are also grateful to the three anonymous referees for their constructive comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02697459.2024.2315393

Notes

1. According to the Council of Europe (1998) gender mainstreaming is ‘The (re)organisation, improvement, development and evaluation of policy processes, so that a gender equality perspective is incorporated in all policies at all levels and at all stages, by the actors normally involved in policy-making.’

2. In 2016, the MSRT enacted the ‘Delegation of Curriculum Planning Authority to Universities’ statute, empowering select academic centres in Iran (listed as grade I and II) to revise their curriculum. This regulation aimed to align the curriculum with the society’s present and future requirements, update it in line with advancements in human knowledge, and tailor it to the specific needs of the academic centres.

3. See Reeves (2019)’s commentary on making ‘gender’ explicit to planning core curriculum.

4. These categories are environment, urban economy, urban sociology, sustainable environment, history and theory of planning, urban regeneration, transport and infrastructure planning, housing, urban management and law, geography and regional planning, urban planning methods and techniques, urban design methods and techniques, design of the built environment, quantitative methods, research methods for urban planning.

5. For international audience it is necessary to highlight that in Iran urban planning discipline is considered as subcategory of the broader engineering domain.

6. We are grateful to PhD. adeh Hosseini for drawing our attention to this keyword.

7. Cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from rationality in judgment in which decision making and judgment of individuals is framed on a series of pre-assumptions and initial information that are often conditioned by common norms and beliefs (see Haselton et al., 2005)

8. Co-creative planning pedagogy is understood as ‘a process in which various actors mutually exchange knowledge in an educational context’ (Van Karnenbeek et al., 2022).

9. Experiential learning is ‘an instructional approach through which learners apply their knowledge and understanding in an integrated manner, to real-world complexities and challenges’ (Shroff et al., 2021).