Journal of Public Affairs Education

Most graduates of MPA programs will lead cross-sector collaborative efforts during their careers, and they will find that this task requires a skill set distinctive from that required by management within a single organization or within a single sector. Based on a grounded analysis of in-depth interviews with 30 experienced public and nonprofit managers, this paper distills their lessons learned into a collaboration model and a set of learning objectives and activities to help prepare students to lead successful cross-sector collaboration. These practitioners’ experiences teach that students must understand the interplay between formal and informal aspects of collaborative relationships and how these affect collaboration outcomes, organizational learning, and learning throughout the collaborative system.

This article is the first to discuss how the complementary and practical natures of emotional labor (EL) (Guy, Newman, & Mastracci, 2006), and communication accommodation theory (CAT) (Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1991; Giles, et al., 2005) can help shape the field of public and nonprofit administration by translating communication breakdowns into opportunities. This is achieved by presenting these concepts and processes through the Seeing Beyond Words exercise that links EL with CAT. The exercise proposes that, if individuals acquire the necessary communication skills to determine how (a) to express or suppress emotions in career roles, and (b) to counteract these dilemmas, then they will more often attain organizational goals (Kimoto, 2006a, 2006b, 2007, 2008; Kimoto, Frasco, Mulder, & Juta, 2009).

During the course of their academic experience, public administration students are expected to work as teams in order to complete projects and embrace a team-based philosophy for addressing public needs. Traditional team-development pedagogy omits a critical piece for future public administrators – developing team-development skills and competence through explicit reflection, modeling, and analysis of the team-development lifecycle. This paper demonstrates how modeling the team development lifecycle within a course setting — forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning (Tuckman, 1965; Tuckman & Jensen, 1977) — encourages students to explore the team-development process, and to experience and reflect on corresponding emotional and behavioral responses at the various team-development stages. By explicitly modeling the strategies in the context of an entire class serving as a single team, students develop a greater confidence and competence to engage future team-development opportunities. This article (a) articulates a strategy for how to model the team-development lifecycle in public administration courses, (b) identifies anticipated affective responses, and (c) offers examples of lessons learned, so that instructors can apply this pedagogical approach.

Learning from their shared experiences at the Teaching Public Administration Conference held in Frankfurt, Kentucky in 2009, three adjunct instructors give voice to the hundreds of practioners teaching in the field of public administration. The authors articulate varying ways that adjuncts challenge students to move beyond the text and examine what it means to do public administration. Drawing from the work of Newman, Guy and Mastracci (2009), the authors argue how they are uniquely qualified to not only prepare effective, but affective, future leaders.

Master’s programs in Public Administration (MPA) may contribute to a better platform for exchange between the academy and the field of practice. But how should such programs be designed and run to meet the ambition of bringing together study and work experience? This contribution analyzes that question and develops an educational philosophy of de-linking and re-linking. It reports on the educational practice of the MPA program for practitioners at Erasmus University Rotterdam, which is based on this analysis and philosophy. The thesis of the paper is that programs like this one need a specific pedagogical approach. An outline of such an approach is presented.

This paper addresses a growing mismatch between the business problems confronting public and nonprofit employees, and the financial analysis and management skills commonly taught in graduate programs in public administration and policy. Put simply, it argues that public-service financial education should move beyond its traditional focus on public-sector budgeting and provide a broader range of financial-market, analytic, and management tools that are appropriate to meet the demands of the current public and nonprofit workplace. To assist programs in making the transition, we offer a model for assessing stakeholder needs and designing a 21st-century finance curriculum.