Journal of Public Affairs Education

Teaching cultural competency is a two-way street. Instruction is more comprehensive when it raises awareness of cultural context. And students see relevancy when they learn how theories and principles relate to the context they know. Cultural context is especially obvious in nations colonized by cultures different from theirs. India provides a compelling example because it has a blended public service culture containing several parts tradition and several parts that fit uncomfortably with the nation’s psyche. This discussion uses public administration in India to demonstrate how cultural context shapes preferences for institutions and how it influences expectations for interpersonal dynamics when state meets street. After presenting the Indian scenario, suggestions are provided for how to incorporate cultural competency into the curriculum and how to spotlight it in a classroom exercise.

Emotional labor refers to the management and regulation of emotions as part of one’s professional role. This research is one of the first to provide insight into the role of emotional labor during a global pandemic for Master of Public Administration (MPA) Program directors. Our paper both replicates and extends previous work in emotional labor through examining survey data from 92 MPA Directors. Using emotional labor as our descriptive framework, the findings suggest gender and academic rank indicate whose workload has been affected during the coronavirus pandemic. Furthermore, the results indicate the likelihood of greater burdens experienced by women, both white women and women of color. Our findings offer additional understanding about how emotional labor continues to impact certain populations within our public administration and policy discipline, sounding the alarm for MPA programs to address the problems at hand.

This article presents the pedagogical, observational, and empirical findings from a social equity centered team-taught course that served as an effective learning approach for both students and faculty during a time of great uncertainty and unrest in 2020. The article begins by describing the context for why this course was offered, outlining the need to use a collaborative teaching approach that centers social equity and interdisciplinary expertise when issues such as a global pandemic and racial injustice arise. The authors then describe the methodology and findings associated with surveying students and faculty members who were engaged with the course and share four themes that emerged from the research. The authors conclude by sharing lessons learned, recommendations, and a call to action to scholars and practitioners to use a collaborative pedagogical approach that centers social equity and interdisciplinary expertise when addressing complex and timely issues in public administration.

This study provides an update on the major topics covered in the required, core public budgeting and financial management courses offered by NASPAA accredited programs in the U.S. and explores how NASPAA competencies are addressed in these courses. Based on a survey of 39 NASPAA accredited programs and a content analysis of 60 course syllabi, this study finds that public budgeting and financial management courses still focus on budgeting, which has not changed since the 1980s. In addition, with no curricular guidelines to benchmark the public budgeting and financial management curriculum, programs are left to interpret and assess NASPAA competencies in their courses and there is a significant variation in how they are assessed. The study concludes with a call for more research on budgeting and financial management education.

The general growth in public affairs programs offering hybrid and online courses to reach a wide variety of students, along with the necessity of doing so during a global health pandemic, calls for an investigation of best practices in teaching public affairs statistics and research-oriented courses. These courses often require the use of a statistics software program. I describe my use of R with the R Commander package that turns the R interface into a graphical user interface (GUI) similar to other, commonly used software programs. I detail my experience using this software through a case study utilizing two different pedagogical techniques. I find that the use of instructor-generated video tutorials of the R Commander software program allows hybrid and online students to effectively learn statistics concepts in a similar manner and as effectively as students in traditional, in-person courses.

Preconceived expectations for one’s behavior drive how people interact with their communities. Messaging via pop culture is a common source for citizens to learn about one community engagement tool: compulsory volunteering. Compulsory volunteering, like court-ordered community service and school-based volunteering, provides an opportunity to learn and “give back” to one’s community. The authors ask, what is the value of compulsory volunteering according to pop culture messaging? Textual analysis is used to identify common themes among 48 episodes of U.S. television about community service and service-learning. Findings indicate that popular culture teaches society that compulsory volunteering is more often a chore to avoid than a way to give back. Volunteers on television perceive power as placed in the wrong hands, and plots center on regaining agency. This power displacement becomes problematic if viewers perceive the volunteer supervisor as an antagonist to defeat. Nonprofits should anticipate misunderstandings when onboarding coerced volunteers.