Journal of Public Affairs Education

Over the past two decades, public policy professors have been confronted with a choice to teach either from the traditional positivist approach grounded in rationality, objectivity, and economics or from a postpositivist approach grounded in politics, subjectivity, and democracy. Yet, such a choice is both false and limiting. Instead, we argue that it is possible to teach a practical public policy analysis course based on mixed methodologies that stems from both the positivism and postpositivism camps. At the pedagogical center of this approach is the case method. Our approach is grounded in both the belief and experience that the combination of an approach that is pragmatic, yet infused with politics, and a stimulating case also serves to increase student interest. In this article, we present a class-tested case study ready for use by faculty members in courses in public policy analysis, public policy, and, introductory public administration. Along the way, we provide guidance on how to use the case and how it fits into a mixed methodological approach.

This paper examines how social network analysis (SNA) methods and tools can be used to evaluate instruction and teaching methods in an MPA program. With a unique way of collecting and analyzing data—both statistically and visually— SNA tools enable public affairs educators to (a) identify patterns of interaction among students, (b) identify characteristics of student friendships and advice networks, (c) design teaching methods and interventions to facilitate student interaction, and (d) develop students’ interpersonal skills so they can learn in collaborative environments. The case study in this paper provides an example of how SNA was used to evaluate changes in student interactions and collaborative learning during an MPA class at the University of Central Florida (UCF).

This article describes and analyzes a new approach to teaching collaborative leadership to masters of public administration students at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. The 3-year-old course teaches students how to design a collaborative network with the necessary players at the table; structure governance for a collaborative group; negotiate ethically to best leverage resources; facilitate meetings of a network; manage conflict among network members; effectively engage the public, including designing and sequencing civic engagement to make effective use of public knowledge; design useful systems for evaluating the outcomes of collaboration; and operate within the legal constraints on collaborative public agency action. The theoretical and pedagogical underpinnings of the course are explained. Ideas and lessons for the field are offered.

With the increasingly changing demographics of the U. S. population, increased opportunities for an effective public sector arise. The opportunities can be found in new and innovative approaches to the government-citizen relationships, which take into account the cultural diversity of their population. Cultural competency initiatives within the public sector allow for increased effectiveness of the public sector and the public it serves. The following article explores where these opportunities for cultural competency initiatives can be placed within the public affairs curriculum. The article provides a framework for a cultural competency curriculum in public affairs based on four conceptual approaches: knowledgebased, attitude-based, skills-based, and community-based. Cultural competency discourse in academia sets the necessary foundation for future public administrators working in increasingly diverse populations.

Traditional public administration scholarship focused on government, reflecting the study of public actors delivering services. But recently the focus on government and governmental actors has been replaced by a new term “governance” to reflect the increasing reliance on for-profit, nonprofit, and faith-based organizations to deliver these services. The reasons for the government by proxy are varied, yet little attention has been given to its constitutional implications. This article examines the implications of this new governance when it comes to service delivery of traditional public goods by public, for-profit, non-profit, and faith-based organizations. It describes the challenges this blurring of sectoral lines poses both for the study of public administration and in the teaching and training of students.

In this article, we describe and evaluate a teaching project embedded within a core policy analysis course that allows students to engage with a major public policy issue—in our case, environmental policy—without a corresponding cost in terms of reducing curricular space for developing general policy analysis skills. We think that a win-win arrangement is attainable: a fairly intense immersion into a key thematic area of public policy and a correspondingly more vivid, realistic, and integrated treatment of general policy analysis. The project has the potential to allow teachers and students to explore in depth and develop the skills and appreciation required for practice in any major policy area, even in tightly packed graduate policy programs.

Continuing 21st-century Wall Street ethical scandals have triggered calls, by leading business school professors and others, for major reforms in the MBA curriculum. The goal of this reform movement is to challenge the dominance of the nonnormative organizational economics paradigm in MBA education by introducing a management model that features both efficiency and ethics as co-equal determinants of organizational outcomes. The article argues that diffusing public management’s market efficiency/public failure model across the MBA curriculum would accomplish the reformer’s institutional and societal objectives. Moreover, the implementation and diffusion of this construct into the MBA curriculum would both (a) help public management escape the intellectual absolutism of what Kelman (2007) calls the “public administration ghetto” and (b) enhance the discipline’s reputation as an ethical decision-making model in the marketplace of management ideas.