Integrating Curriculum, Research, and Civic Engagement with the Policy Research Shop Model (original) (raw)
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Waltzing with a Monster: Bringing Research to Bear on Public Policy
Journal of Social Issues, 2007
Social scientists who want their research to influence social policy would do well to work with executive branch agencies, especially at state and local levels. Agency administrators are ready to use social science theories and evidence if the social science is brought to them. The article offers six principles for work with administrative agencies: (1) individual leaders matter, (2) timing matters, (3) ideas matter, (4) costs, and who bears the costs matter, (5) government is not monolithic, and (6) one cannot control the uses to which data are put. Working with government, like waltzing with a monster, is not unproblematic, but attending to these principles can help avoid some bruised toes.
Public management, politics, and the policy process in the public affairs curriculum
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2008
To gain an appreciation of some of the challenges of the management, politics and policy process parts of the public affairs curriculum, now and in the next ten years, it is instructive to return to the early days-the 1970s and 1980s when public policy programs sprung up around the United States. And, to do this with a sense of both nostalgia and Yogi Berra-style déjà vu all over again, I recommend a rereading of Donald Stokes' essay in the fall 1986 issue of the Journal of Public Policy and Management (JPPAM). Much of what he wrote has great staying power. For those who read it many years ago and do not remember the piece, and for those who never read it in the first place, let me summarize his major points. Stokes reminds us not only about the origins of public policy education in the United States but, more importantly, the relatively small group of political scientists who selfconsciously rejected a particular image of public administration which was said to be stodgy at best, a-theoretically descriptive and lacking prescriptive content that could provide political grist for improved policy processes. This put political science and its close management cousins at a distinct disadvantage to economists in public affairs education-a disadvantage that continues, in my judgment, to the present day. It can be seen, for example, in the pages of JPPAM (curiously a cursory review of the early years of the journal shows greater representation of public management content than more recently) and the annual research conference of the Association. Stokes went on to review, somewhat casually to be charitable, some of the courses extant twenty years ago. Courses with management, politics, and policy process content focused on (1) the internal management of the agency and (2) the external political environment. Presumably, the content in these courses would help to prepare future senior public managers and leaders-a bold goal to have for twenty-five year olds. As Stokes pointed out, the descriptive knowledge and the skills associated with this heady objective were embryonic when Stokes published his essay 20 years ago. We tried to overcome the economists' conceit by enriching our curriculum through pedagogical devices to simulate the real world, especially using public management and policy cases and applied policy "workshops." Stokes offered an important caution by drawing an analogy to a flight simulator which has the virtue of presenting a rich array of scenarios to students in the relative safety of the simulator room, that is, the classroom. But, there are real limits as he pointed out: No one who works with the case or workshop method is likely to miss the very real possibility that it will impart misleading or wrong insights to future practitioners. It is, after all, easy enough to build a flight simulator that will teach pilots to crash planes. What is difficult-and requires exacting if behindthe-scenes technical knowledge-is building a simulator that is closely matched to problems or situations pilots will actually encounter (1986: 51).
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 1995
Students are an important teaching resource-especially in professional education environments where they often bring many years of personal experience into the classroom. In the following article, Cohen, Eimicke, and Ukeles describe a two-semester workshop course sequence designed to make full use of students as a teaching resource. We commend this article to our readers, first, because their workshop course effectively combines policy analysis and public management by focusing on the challenge of program design. Just as automobile manufacturers have come to recognize that separating the design function from the manufacturing function often leads to low quality automobiles that are costly to build, the separation of policy analysis from program management often leads to ineffectual programs that are costly to deliver. Second, their course structure makes a virtue of the political enthusiasm, administrative naivete, incomplete information, and compressed time horizons that often surround the implementation of new initiatives by focusing on current legislative initiatives and a demanding milestone-driven schedule of work products. Third, because the working groups are large and the required work to be done substantial, there is little possibility that one individual could effectively take up the slack for nonperforming members of the group: This activity requires true group work. And finally, we commend this article because of the level of detail it provides regarding the practical administrative structure of a successful workshop program. Successful curriculum initiatives, in our experience, are often differentiated from unsuccessful ones, not by overall conceptual design, but by attention to details.
Special issue on the teaching–research nexus in public administration curricula
Research and teaching are the main substantive activities of university staff members. How are both areas connected to each other? What is the role of research in teaching? How can research be used to improve the quality and impact of teaching? This is exactly what this special issue of Teaching Public Administration is about. Everybody will agree that one of the core tasks of teaching staff at the public administration departments of universities consists of conducting and publishing research, as well as teaching students about the discipline. However, research and teaching do not always seem to match. Life inside the classroom seems to be becoming increasingly detached from the research that is being undertaken by the teachers themselves. However, students could greatly benefit from a stronger connection between research and teaching. First of all, a connection between or the integration of research and teaching may help students to become research-minded and to perform actual research more adequately. Methods courses and dedicated research assignments are, of course, essential, but more inclusive integration of research into teaching may help students to gain a better feeling for which methods could or should be used when, and for how data may be interpreted. Secondly, a research orientation in teaching may help students to become more critical and reflexive. On an academic level, 'knowledge' should not be taken for granted, but its base, presupposi-tions and meaning, should be subject to debate. Students should socialize in a culture in which such debate, and their creative participation in it, is self-evident. The purpose of this special issue is to bring together contributions that deal with issues on incorporating research into teaching programs. The issue has been compiled by a group of higher-education specialists in public administration, from a number of northern European countries and from California, USA. For several years now, authors from the northern European countries have been
The work of crafting sustainable solutions to complex policy problems requires decision makers and implementers to secure buy-in from a diverse set of stakeholders. Those stakeholders operate in policy ecosystems that span public, forprofit, nonprofit, and entrepreneurial sectors. This increasingly complex landscape requires schools of public affairs, policy, and administration to reconsider how to provide graduates with more advanced and integrated skill sets than ever before. Since 2013, several groups of public and educational leaders have met to discuss this challenge, culminating in a collective redesign effort driven to imagine a new public service education curriculum. This essay highlights core issues identified in collective discussions, and then proposes four principles to drive the curricular redesign process: (1) build sustained partnerships between public and educational sectors, (2) focus on competency-based learning, (3) instill a lifelong learning mind-set in students, and (4) integrate new modalities for learning.
Undergraduate and Doctoral Education in Public Policy
2016
In 1986, a small group of public policy faculty gathered at Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, for a conference on what was then a novel enterprise in professional education for public service. The enterprise grew into the dozens of master's programs in policy analysis and management that now cover not only the United States but the globe, and on the twentieth anniversary of that influential meeting, APPAM organized a conference at Park City, Utah, where a much larger group of faculty gathered to reflect backward on how policy analysis education had evolved, and forward on where it should be going. The Park City conference was organized around a set of commissioned papers, each providing a starting point and common ground for discussion sessions that were in turn recorded by rapporteurs. Rapporteurs were asked to write essays capturing the most important themes of their sessions, not to merely transcribe the conversation, and they did so admirably. The Curriculum and Case Notes section of JPAM is publishing a selection of the papers and discussion reports. This is the fourth and final installment. It includes Eric Jensen's paper on law, economics, and craft skills courses, with Roland Cole's discussion report; a review of practitioners' participation in MPP programs by Robert Garris, Janice Madden, and William Rodgers, and its discussion report by Kenneth Apfel; the paper on policy Ph.D. and undergraduate programs by Dylan Conger, Joseph Cordes, Helen Ladd, and Michael Luger and a discussion report by Cordes; and my paper on pedogical issues with the discussion report by Michael Lipsky.
Analyzing Policy Fields: Helping Students Understand Complex State and Local Contexts
Journal of Public Affairs Education, 2008
A collaborative approach to public management is critical in an era of governance that depends upon networks more than centralized bureaucracies, yet public affairs education has not adequately responded to the need to develop new tools to support analysis of complex settings. Policy field analysis is one tool that can help professionals-in-training learn to act purposively within complex policy environments. Policy fields-public and private institutions, in a substantive public policy or program area, in a particular place-shape how state and local actors work to solve public management problems, and their pursuit of programmatic goals in turn shapes the policy field. Using a well-known teaching case, the authors present a series of analytical questions and mapping tools that help clarify the structure of complex policy environments; the institutional and interorganizational relationships involved; and the resources that influence interactions in the policy field. Many public affairs scholars have noted the significant transformation in public service provision over the last 30 years (Agranoff and McGuire, 2003; Kickert et al., 1997; Milward and Provan, 2000; Salamon, 2002). The centralized state has given way to the hollow state in which governments at all levels rely upon other public, nonprofit, and private organizations to carry out public programs. These same governments utilize a variety of investment tools-such as tax incentives, purchase of service contracts, loan guarantees, and vouchers-to work with these diverse organizations. Increasingly, unusual partnerships are being formed between nonprofit agencies and public agencies, citizen groups, and businesses to modify public programs and carry out policy ideas. There are new calls for a collaborative approach to public management and for scholarly attention to the
Journal of Family Theory & Review, 2019
This article explores growing pessimism among those scholars who wish to see rigorous research used more frequently to formulate public policy. That commonsense aspiration is threatened by the impoverished dialogue between the communities that conduct studies (researchers) and those that apply them to decisions (policymakers). To examine this disconnect, the authors advance community dissonance theory, which proposes that a better understanding in the research community of the inhabitants, institutions, and cultures of the policy community could increase communication and trust. Community dissonance theory extends earlier two‐communities theories by deconstructing the cultural impediments to optimal communication. Building on previous literature and supported with in‐depth interviews of state policymakers, this article examines professional culture and institutional culture (e.g., preferred decision‐making processes, interactional preferences, favored epistemological frameworks, dom...
Undergraduate and doctoral education in public policy: What? Why? Why not? Whereto?
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2008
In 1986, a small group of public policy faculty gathered at Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, for a conference on what was then a novel enterprise in professional education for public service. The enterprise grew into the dozens of master's programs in policy analysis and management that now cover not only the United States but the globe, and on the twentieth anniversary of that influential meeting, APPAM organized a conference at Park City, Utah, where a much larger group of faculty gathered to reflect backward on how policy analysis education had evolved, and forward on where it should be going. The Park City conference was organized around a set of commissioned papers, each providing a starting point and common ground for discussion sessions that were in turn recorded by rapporteurs. Rapporteurs were asked to write essays capturing the most important themes of their sessions, not to merely transcribe the conversation, and they did so admirably. The Curriculum and Case Notes section of JPAM is publishing a selection of the papers and discussion reports. This is the fourth and final installment. It includes Eric Jensen's paper on law, economics, and craft skills courses, with Roland Cole's discussion report; a review of practitioners' participation in MPP programs by Robert Garris, Janice Madden, and William Rodgers, and its discussion report by Kenneth Apfel; the paper on policy Ph.D. and undergraduate programs by Dylan Conger, Joseph Cordes, Helen Ladd, and Michael Luger and a discussion report by Cordes; and my paper on pedogical issues with the discussion report by Michael Lipsky.