Meeting practitioners where they are: A conversation on engaged learning in policy and management

Abstract

Our paper is a practitioner reflection that explores the concepts of engaged learning as a means of erasing the specious divide between academia and policy/management practice. It takes the form of a conversation between the two authors, each of whom have significant experience in both camps, but who also would seem to fall more neatly into one than the other. The paper outlines our experiences in professional development, with an emphasis on a specific series of organisational trust workshops, which use an ‘embodied values’ approach so that learning outcomes are built into the structure and process of the session rather than just in content. We utilise a conversational approach as this enables us to expand on broader themes as well as draw on our experiences. More importantly, it also is redolent of the embodied values approach and demonstrates the types of shared learning we seek to promote as useful for the future.

Opening thoughts

When we submitted this piece to Teaching Public Administration we deliberately avoided a traditional introduction and conclusion because we thought it would be against the spirit of the conversational approach we wanted to use here. It was suggested to us by a reviewer and we both think they hit on an excellent point, one that resonated so strongly with us we have even slightly amended the title of the article. One of the main themes in this discussion is adaptation to the audience: our approach to teaching is to meet practitioners where they are rather than where some academics might like them to be. In not including the traditional opening and closing sections here we had not taken into account the audience who will be reading this. While every public administration researcher we know loves to think their work will be read by people other than students and other academics, we all know that’s a pretty rare occurrence. And indeed, in our case, the practitioner audience is academia (generally understood) as this is about learning and teaching. So we appreciate that having an introduction and conclusion is something that will, on reflection, probably help orientate most readers and therefore serve a useful purpose and remains true to the intent of the piece.

There are no major theoretical claims in this paper, and hopefully that is authentic to the techniques we espouse. We base our ideas on years and years of practice, which we fully appreciate also represent myriad anecdotes. But this is actually in keeping with our engaged learning approach. In order to work with people constructively in a workshop or classroom we would never start with theory and work our way in. We always start with the people in the room and work our way out to theoretical perspectives. The same is the case in our article. We start with ourselves, move onto our practice, then connect that to broader points regarding engaged pedagogy. We will leave to others to theorise further. One final procedural note – when we originally wrote this we anonymized ourselves, but we have reverted back to using our initials now as it seems needlessly esoteric to pretend we are keeping our identities hidden.

Onto our conversation

MM

Hiya, thanks for agreeing write the paper via a conversation. I suppose we should start by introducing ourselves and the themes of the paper? I’ve been teaching in universities since 1995 and am currently a Professor at the Victoria University School of Government in Aotearoa New Zealand and moved there in 2011. Since then I have spent as much time as possible working directly with government agencies and NGOs across Australasia and this engagement directly informs my thoughts for this paper.

CO

So, my background is in regional public policy development, and I completed my doctorate whilst working in a policy role, so I commenced my career by traversing both the academic and practitioner worlds, and I’ve continued to do so since. I’ve undertaken a variety of policy, commissioning, and academic research posts. I’m currently working in healthcare commissioning and public involvement for the North East and North Cumbria Integrated Care Board (NENC ICB), whilst also continuing some academic research and teaching.

MM

So is it fair to say that you are a public policy practitioner with a firm foot in academia and higher education? Whereas I’m an academic who spends a lot of time working directly with the policy world?

CO

Yes, that sounds fair and that’s going to be a key theme of the discussion – how to bridge that divide. And the bigger theme is engaged teaching, and doing that through embodying the values and principles you are trying to help people to think about and learn. With this in mind, it makes sense for us to write a paper that embodies the values of practice-based discussion, which we can then bring out more generalised learning points. Hopefully doing it this way will help us walk the walk.

What’s our state of play?

MM

It’s probably helpful for people to know we are not actually talking but exchanging Qs and As, which means our language will be less formal than normal but not completely chatty! Let’s start with our experiences and as this is about engagement I think it’ll be helpful to start with your slightly practitioner focus. What do you see as the key ideas that need to be addressed to help us all move forward?

CO

The first thing is to recognise just how much diversification is needed in education, in content and delivery, if public policy and management is to overcome barriers to accessing learning. It needs to reach practitioners and speak to them on different levels to maintain its relevance, and effectively inform practice.

Building on the issue of access, there are several barriers that need to be thought of. Some are external, most obviously the financial cuts and restraints in public services, which mean that the funding available for organisations to pay for staff to access courses such as degree and Masters courses, and wider training has been reduced. Selection is potentially even more competitive, and there are the backfill costs of releasing staff to undertake study. Often additional study needs to be undertaken in the students’ own time, alongside stressful and challenging work.

Other things are internally focused, especially practitioners’ understanding of what contemporary public administration education can offer and how it can meet their learning needs. It raises the question of whether organisations and individual practitioners fully appreciate how public administration departments could link with their work or the learning opportunities that public administration courses could offer. On the flipside, there’s an issue around how public administration departments make themselves more relevant and build those relationships with public sector organisations. There have been some positive examples of good partnership working between public administration academics and practitioners, for example, the Institute for Local Governance (ILG), which was a Research and Knowledge Exchange Partnership based in the North East of England between local authorities, universities, police and fire rescue services, hosted by Durham University Business School (Chapman et al., 2018). It sought to co-produce research between university researchers and practitioners to promote knowledge exchange and meet the needs of public sector organisations. In the time that it was in operation, it delivered a number of regional-wide studies on areas such as child poverty, the impact of welfare reform, public expenditure cuts, and mental health services for young people (Mawson and Griffin, 2019). It hosted numerous workshops between academics and practitioners and played a crucial role in the development of strong working partnerships. The work of the ILG showed that this kind of challenge could be potentially met with outreach and networking with public sector organisations.

What about your perspective? Do you think you see things differently from your education lens?

MM

I completely agree with those macro level points around diversification, access, understanding what’s on offer, and the building of relationships between public sector organisations and academic researchers, so I doubt I see things too differently. However, the ones that interest me the most are the micro level, internal ones that we (by “we” I mean those of who lead session, facilitate workshops, etc.) can control.

Expectations are always really interesting because people’s backgrounds are usually quite different, even though it is likely that public service practitioners have already completed a Bachelor’s degree and often a Masters degree before their appointment. It’s always important, I think, to make whatever the goal of the session is tangible, although the goal itself can be quite broad: for example it can mean a tangible new way of considering a problem or issue, which might still seem a little abstract to some people. But there always needs to be a legitimate outcome for people. It’s a cliché but a lot of this is in the planning, the more you can collaborate with an agency beforehand and understand their learning needs as an organisation, the more likely it is the workshops will be meaningful. I’m doing this right now with the New South Wales Public Service Commission, we have spent ages developing workshops for delivery later this year but it makes me more confident that they will be valued because of it. Even though you can’t please all the people, all of the time!!

CO

I think you make a good point here about collaboration and planning. Learning Partnerships with public sector organisations, I think, are a good example of that type of collaboration too, such as Insights North East, a project led by Newcastle University to deliver research between the public sector and universities, similar to the ILG model, and delivered via a core partnership with the NHS, North of Tyne Combined Authority Newcastle City Council and Northumbria University (Insights NE, 2023).

I think you’re right that at that level, there are those opportunities potentially for Public Administration academics to support and lead professional competency-based and organisationally focused leadership courses. It should be focused on supporting public sector managers to meet the challenges of designing, commissioning and delivering services, get them to think and work together in new ways, to learn from what the research tells us, and embrace new ideas.

Collaboration is helpful especially because of the changing needs and requirements for public sector practitioners which have moved away from those taught within more traditional policy and public administration degree courses. Public management training needs to consider how it can offer support to those changing needs and requirements of public servants. In the past 20 years, changes to how services are delivered, including increased commissioning to private and voluntary sector partners rather than delivering ‘in house’, has meant the skills, knowledge and experience requirements of effective public sector leadership has changed. Within local government, for example, policy departments have shrunk, and commissioning and management of services has increased, changing the skills and knowledge requirements of practitioners working in these fields.

Healthcare in the U.K is a great example. It changes so quickly, which makes huge demands on leaders, planners and delivers of healthcare services. As well as an increased emphasis on the commissioning of services, management of contracts, monitoring of data, setting of trajectories, and delivery of outcomes with ever decreasing budgets, practitioners are required to have increasingly sophisticated ‘softer’ skills such as being able to collaborate and negotiate with partners across Integrated Care Systems. Collaborative Newcastle is a key example of how health and social care leaders from across a healthcare system are expected to collaborate and share resources to achieve shared outcomes (Ormston and Macaulay, 2024). There is an emphasis on a trust value approach based on reduced budgets leading to greater need for sharing remaining resources, the need for greater collaboration to ensure quality of services, and relational working, particularly to address complex health inequalities and longstanding issues.

An empirical attempt to build engaged learning

MM

Well now you have mentioned trust, it’s probably a good time to introduce the empirical work that I’ve been involved in over many years, which hopefully is a useful example of engaged learning. Since at least 2018 I have run a series of workshops across Australasia on trustworthiness: both individual and organisational. There are full-day, half-day and even 2 hour versions but the basic content and learning outcomes are the same. (1) The building blocks of trustworthiness are essentially the same for both individuals and organisations. (2) They are embodied in specific practices and behaviours. (3) We can control our own trustworthiness but we can never control how much people will trust us as a result. (4) The building blocks of trust can be used as a manipulative technique and people need to be aware of that (Macaulay, 2019).

What is also consistent is the delivery. No matter which version of the workshop is being utilised, a number of core delivery components remain in place. First, it starts with a very broad introduction that highlights who I am and why I am the person facilitating the class. Nothing special or unusual about this but I always make sure to include some personal details (my journey to Aotearoa New Zealand, for example, or things I do away from academia) and ask people to do the same. Depending on our timeframe I might just ask a couple of people or get people to have a little chat with each other.

CO

Would that be the same as a traditional icebreaker?

MM

It hopefully serves the same purpose but also a deeper one, as there will be a direct reference back to it towards the end of the session. But over the years I have found it helpful not to have a classic icebreaker as not only do people not seem to enjoy them, but it’s too formal a signpost. It essentially says “the workshop starts now” and that can put people into a different mode of thinking which means they are not as engaged as I would hope they would be. Informality and light touch is crucial to the session, especially as the conversations can be incredibly serious.

After that, I will show a few statistics and quotes on the latest trends in trust in the public service, or the police, or whoever the client group may be. Then we move straight into people’s experiences and I will ask them to share their stories and perspectives. Again, depending on time this may be a long discussion or a briefer one. The crucial element is for people to explain specific incidents and experiences, not simply what they think of as trust and why it is important. It is essential to keep people away from the abstract at this point simply because the conversation could become too generic and bland. Explaining to people what shaped your view is much more powerful than simply what that view is. This was a little trick I picked up from working with New Zealand Police a few years ago, as they used story-telling workshops to help create new organisational values (my colleague and I wrote about it many years ago, see Macaulay and Rowe, 2020) and it is a technique that works extremely well in my experience.

Following those conversations we extract the commonalities from people’s experiences and they almost always unveil the key building blocks of trustworthiness: credibility; reliability/consistency and a sense of intimacy, or knowing. Even though participants usually use slightly different words, these themes emerge consistently in each workshop. This is always the heart of the discussion and we finish off by looking at the downside – using trust pillars as manipulative technique – and then debrief the session itself.

CO

So how do you know these sessions work, and in what way are they embodying values?

MM

The sessions are usually evaluated and the evaluations are always robust. And anecdotal though it may be, people frequently stay in touch and I end up doing more sessions as a result. Obviously that might be because they’re quick and easy to arrange rather than them being any good!!

But the sessions do embody the three core aspects of trustworthiness, which allows them to be outlined in each workshop in real time, and without any need to discuss theory until as a punctuation at the end.

CO

Do you have pre-reading or any activity beforehand?

MM

Not usually but occasionally a partner organisation will ask for it. The idea is that any participant is an experienced and expert professional, whatever their specific area of practice may be. They already know the elements of trustworthiness even if it is not quite codified as such. If people have pre-reading it is almost a spoiler. Much better for these concepts to emerge from empirical examples.

Credibility is shown in a number of levels. There is the surface-level credibility of the facilitator, which is why it is essential to show links to non-academic practice and also relevant. But the deeper credibility is in the discussion and the sharing of experiences. These invariably show that while organisational context will always be different, there are far more similarities in participants’ experiences of trust situations. Obviously there is no guarantee that every person will find equal levels of credibility in the workshop, but as the theory shows we can only do our best to build trustworthiness, that does not guarantee that we will be trusted. There is also value in looking to foster greater collaborative links between competent public sector managers with strong academic research backgrounds, and, university public administrative academics and departments. This presents opportunity to leverage credibility through working with the right individuals, and this will also help build a culture of ongoing collaboration between organisations, and public administration departments, along with a culture of ongoing learning.

Reliability comes through achieving the stated outcomes for the session and doing so through a consistent style and tenor of delivery. As a talking point we usually refer back to the initial introduction and explain how it is designed to suggest credibility, but that none of the qualifications or titles shown actually demonstrate that the presenter can reliably present. But through engaged learning this reliability is, hopefully, created.

Intimacy is developed throughout but it is why the personalised introduction at the beginning of the session is so important. Giving participants a sense of who you are as a person is not something that is often expected, and without doubt there will be some participants who consider it an overshare to begin with. But personalising the facilitator enables people to see beyond the professional role, even if only slightly. And as above, this is a way to develop trustworthiness even if it does not guarantee trust.

In so doing, I hope that the embodied values approach does not just tell but actually shows how trustworthiness is created, which enables it to be an authentic experience because otherwise it would be manipulative on a surface level, a parlour trick. By showing not only that the theory works, but how it works in real time, hopefully demonstrates a genuine value in having taken part in it. The idea builds upon notions of storytelling and sensemaking to enable the utilisation of both cognitive and affective channels of understanding, which is precisely why the approach is engaging. It connects personal reflection with professional practice, and these practices with theoretical constructs. By using theory from the inside out it allows participants to understand its efficacy almost through an intuitive process of their own life experiences.

CO

That all sounds interesting but is there not a potential stumbling block here? These sound great but how important is it to get the correct person facilitating? It’s all very well you having ran the workshops on multiple occasions but how transferable is something like this?

MM

That’s a fair point but this is just one example. I think different content and values can be embodied differently. It might not work, for example, if I was running sessions on inclusivity in the workplace because of my gender and race, for example, so that needs to be approached differently. For me I would suggest it is a path to engagement, but that engagement is going to look and feel differently depending on what the values are you are working towards. If nothing else I hope this offers a few thoughts for future facilitators. To reiterate these are simply based on the experiences of using this approach, it is not a scientific conclusion.

Tips for developing engaged pedagogies

CO

Work from within. Understanding we are all practitioners allows us to remove unnecessary and detrimental barriers between facilitator and participants. It is essential, then, that new ones are not erected before they need to be. This should be the start of an ongoing working dialogue so that inherent credibility of facilitators is important here. The trust workshops work well partly because there is no pre-reading, no prior work, and nothing to steer participants’ perspectives one way or the other. But it also means that facilitators need to think carefully about the delivery of similar workshops, because the style in which they are conducted can put subconscious signifiers up that sadly reinforce the traditional divide. I think a useful approach here is to always consider ‘so what?’, ‘what are we trying to achieve here’, ‘what is the point?’, and bringing the participants on board, to encourage them to question and challenge. In my view, whilst requiring experienced facilitation skills, it also engenders credibility and trust.

MM

Getting back to something we mentioned at the beginning, I think the biggest lesson I have learned is that no matter who is in the workshop we are all practitioners. The constant division of practitioner and academic is both false and, potentially, damaging. In Australasia at least, it is also unending, and indeed some education organisations make significant amounts of money in propagating this falsehood so that they can arrange, for considerable sums of money, workshops “bridging the divide” between academia and practice. There is no divide. By using Wenger's (1998) definition, our domain of practice is education. Our community is the community of scholars that exists within and between universities, and we include students at all levels within this community. Our practice is the cultivation and dissemination of knowledge, through research, learning and teaching.

The important thing is not to impose your practice. That is another reason why there is no pre-reading, and why we end with theory rather than begin with it. It is the main reason why we have flowing conversations to begin with, anything to show that we are all practitioners, even if we exist in different realms of practice.

Such terminology is a classic example of othering language, which puts up barriers between those leading the workshop and those participating in it, which can almost give an allowance not to take the content seriously because it is only academic, it is not of the practitioner’s world. It is also something that is within our control, or at least partly in our control. Any barriers are anathema to engaged learning and need to be torn down as soon as possible, People on my side of the fence need to keep reminding ourselves are not academics, we are simply education practitioners.

CO

Trying to draw this back together, I think it is fair to say the changing skills and knowledge requirements to allow practitioners to effectively deliver good quality services open a gap which university public administration, management and leadership departments could effectively fill. In fact, it could be argued that it is needed more than ever. It’s not enough now for beleaguered public sector managers to have the traditional background of a social science or public administration-related BA (Hons) and Masters degrees, along with the standard skill sets to analyse national and local policy, understand legal obligations in relation to and outwith their respective service areas, along with the technical competency to deliver the duties associated with their respective posts.

The challenge of commissioning and delivering effective and successful public services in the current and future public sector environment with increasingly reduced budgets and greater demands to achieve nationally set targets, inspection requirements whether it be CQC, the Care Quality Commission, the independent regulator which assesses and inspects health and social care services; or Ofsted, The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, which inspects services providing education and skills, require a broader set of skills than at any time previously. I feel that much of these additional skills are around development of relationships and building trust, within and across organisations, who need to work together and share resources in order to address ‘wicked’ and entrenched public policy problems, which past efforts show cannot be solved by one organisation on its’ own.

MM

Again – unsurprisingly – I agree and while the example here does not necessarily speak to some of the more meso and macro level issues you mention I hope it shows that within the classroom, we can create engaged learning.

CO

And just to finish off completely back with the start, we hope that this paper has embodied the values of engaged learning we have been promoting: (1) experience led; (2) breaking down the barriers of formal and informal learning; (3) sharing rather than imposing practice.

Final thoughts

Hopefully the final elements above serve as a conclusion but we are happy to formally draw the article to a close in a more traditional way. Engaged learning led by academic practitioners creates an opportunity to develop, improve and foster new ways to address the issues faced by public sector managers in often rapidly changing macro policy environments. For that to be fully realised, there is a need for academic public administration departments to consider factors such as diversification, potential barriers to access and responding to those, and understanding the learning needs of public sector organisations, including developing relationships and working with public sector managers to identify those needs. The exploration of the public sector Trust workshops in Australasia shows how this might be approached in action, and hopefully provides ideas for others to build upon. Creativity and responsiveness are key. These are challenging times for those working within public services and they could benefit from learning and support in addressing both entrenched issues and navigating ever changing organisational and broader structural change. Engaged learning enables different groups of practitioners (education and policy) to meet each other where they are and make constructive, collaborative inroads into finding new ways forward.