Journal of Public Affairs Education

Feedback from graduates often indicates that their training failed to adequately prepare them for the human processes involved in the administration and delivery of public services. Although provided with training in cognitive skills, they are left on their own to acquire an appreciation for, and to develop skill in, nuanced emotive skills. This is especially the case for graduates who work in service-delivery programs that are emotionally intense, such as disaster services, child protective services, domestic violence, emergency medical services, corrections, and law enforcement. To a lesser degree, it is the case for all programs that provide person-to-person services. This paper discusses why these skills are important, how they are referred to in the proposed National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration Standards 2009, and explains how they can be incorporated into a curriculum.

Almost all faculty, even those in graduate public affairs programs, will at some time encounter incivility in the classroom. How we respond sends an important message about how we as individuals, programs, and a profession value civility. Master’s of Public Administration and Master’s of Public Policy programs have a particular responsibility to graduate individuals who not only have substantive expertise but also meet the highest standards of civility. In this essay, we present a series of recommendations for how individuals, programs, and institutions might respond to incivility. While not all of these recommendations will be appropriate for all programs, and some may be perceived as more troubling than the problem they are intended to address, we hope that they will to serve as the starting point in stimulating discussion of this issue within programs and across the profession.

The changing nature of the public sector brings new challenges to governance and ethical decision making. A main objective of the Master’s of Public Administration (MPA) program is to bring current the pedagogy of ethics, in order to reflect the evolving nature of the sector. This article reports on one such effort that was employed in an introductory MPA course, using the approach outlined by Walton, Stearns, and Crespy in 1997. It also provides details on the students’ evaluations of the coursework related to the ethics module. The ethics assignment given to students was designed to illustrate the complexity of moral reasoning that is required to maintain adherence to ethical principles, when processes lead to conflicts between deeply held value systems. Students are provided with an updated administrative framework that builds upon our Constitutional values, and emphasizes the implications of decision making for a population that is broader and more diverse than those in the past.

The first protection against ethical lapses in the nonprofit sector presumably is to provide a sound foundation in ethical training at institutions of higher learning. To understand what we hypothesized as the fragmented state of ethics pedagogy in the nonprofit management field, we surveyed educational programs that offer graduate degrees, certificates or concentration programs in the management or study of nonprofit organizations. We found that two-thirds of the respondents offered an ethics course, but fewer than 40 percent required completion of an ethics course. Moreover, the nature and content of ethics courses varied widely in scope, methods, and emphases. To improve the overall state of ethics pedagogy, we recommend instruction programs that equip students with the tools to master three steps in administrative ethics: (a) identifying the scope of an ethical administrator’s work; (b) defining the content of the appropriate ethical standards; and (c) developing a deliberative process so that an administrator can appropriately assess ethical questions and chart a satisfactory course for resolving salient issues.

The goal of public service education is to prepare students to serve in the public interest. Educational outcome measurement is an important method in determining whether public service programs actually are achieving their intended objectives. This paper provides a “Model of Learning Outcomes for Public Service Education.” This model builds on what we already know about outcome assessment, and elaborates on how public service education adds value to individuals, organizations, and governance. Key to this Model of Learning Outcomes for Public Service Education is what we term “enabling characteristics,” or factors that mediate the relationship between short-term, intermediate, and longer-term outcomes in public service education. This process enables practitioners to assess their public service education programs and determine to what extent they add value to students, organizations, and governance. Ultimately, this Model of Learning Outcomes for Public Service Education can be used to improve public service education programs.

This article provides insight on the knowledge transfer of long-term programs in public management within the Belgian public sector. Two basic questions are addressed: What does transfer of public management programs to the workplace mean? And which transfer-inhibiting and -stimulating factors can be identified? The Learning Transfer System Inventory is used as a methodological tool to conduct this study. Results reveal that the transfer from the studied programs is inhibited by factors within the individual, the transfer climate, and the training program. The main problems seem to be that (a) the climate towards transfer is passive or neutral, (b) respondents are insufficiently prepared to enroll, and (c) training shows a gap between theory and practice. Because of these inhibiting factors, the “use” of program knowledge is limited to knowledge-based, interactive, or political use of new information. This article, which provides an incentive to assess other programs, emphasizes that educational programs in public management will be improved if sufficient effort is put into the conceptualization and implementation phases of a program.

This paper presents the results of a content analysis of the titles and descriptions of methods courses offered in 44 graduate programs in public policy at universities and colleges in the U. S., and compares the results to those of an earlier survey on the methodological preferences of policy professionals. The rationale for classifying methods courses as quantitative and qualitative and the results of the past research on methods courses are discussed. The results of the analyses show that quantitative methods are used in a large majority of the courses studied and that they are prevalent in the practice of policy professionals. The authors question whether the prevalence of a quantitative/positivist methodological approach in public policy programs and practice is a good match for the demands of today’s complex world of governance.

In this article, a librarian and a professor who work at the same university trace the development of information literacy standards. These standards were applied retrospectively to a graduate course that the professor teaches; the librarian was one of his students at that time. The article offers suggestions for guiding students on how to use and evaluate information resources, in order to complete a term-long research project. It also addresses librarians’ efforts in educating both students and other faculty on information literacy.

Public affairs education is beginning to reflect the increasing internationalization of the field. While many of our professors are experienced teachers of international and intercultural content, most of our programs are just starting to provide international immersion experiences. Crafting those opportunities in ways that are accessible to typical graduate students is a monumental, but rewarding, task.