Abstract
In response to the increased complexity that comes from a shift away from government and toward governance, public administration programs need to adjust their traditional curriculum and encourage interdisciplinarity perspectives in students. Given the proper mind-set, administrators can be better prepared to face the challenges of governance in a highly integrated, real-life setting by having the capacity to integrate competing viewpoints, which includes a reintroduction of interdisciplinary theories, methods, and best practices to the classroom. Cognitive flexibility—the ability for an individual to understand, appreciate, and make use of various epistemological approaches—offers a theoretical perspective to guide practical pedagogy and practice.
Justice Scalia (1997) remarked that the first year of law school provides students with an “intellectual rebirth, the acquisition of a whole new mode of perceiving and thinking” (p. 3). During this initiation to the profession, each student is taught to “think like a lawyer” (Scalia, 1997, p. 3). Justice Breyer (2005) similarly pointed out that lawyers’ “professional training and experience leads them to examine language, history, tradition, precedent, purpose, and consequences” in a way such that “judges often agree about how these factors, taken together, point to the proper results in a particular case” (p. 110). This disciplinary model of integration works well for the study of the law because it grounds students in a comprehensive legal approach that allows for predictability and stability. To similarly acclimate its students to the rigors of the profession, some scholars argue that public administration should pursue and develop its own “signature pedagogy” (Abel, 2009). However, the field of public administration has never reached a level of disciplinary cohesiveness which would allow for such a strategy to exist. In other words, public administrators are not taught to think like public administrators, at least not in the same way as students of law. Rather than seeing this lack of a singular method for education as a potential shortfall, teachers of public administration would do well to take full advantage of the inherent interdisciplinarity of the field and work to thoughtfully integrate various disciplinary perspectives into the classroom. The result of such efforts would be a new generation of flexible civil servants uniquely prepared for the complexity of the real-life problems that will face them after graduation.
To a certain degree, public administrators have always drawn from a host of different disciplines to address the technical, social, and political problems that fall under their care. Fry and Raadschelders (2008) noted that “public administration is notoriously a borrowing discipline—if, indeed, discipline is the right word” (p. 13). This reliance on fields ranging from sociology to economics to civil engineering is natural, and ought to be duly recognized as an asset to public administration. In fact, Hoffman (2002) noted that 19th century public administration figures at Johns Hopkins University relied on a diverse array of topics such as law, history, economics, ethics, and politics to address emerging administrative issues. Yet, the continued effort to incorporate knowledge from various disciplinary backgrounds was “largely eclipsed by structuralist reforms and scientific management” (Hoffman, 2002, p. 21). In particular, the field’s devotion to and pursuit of science has often stifled its ability to integrate other variables in the administrative process (Spicer, 2010).
Even though there has not been a sustained effort to adopt an interdisciplinary mind-set, figures within the field have advocated for knowledge integration and for a reliance on a mixture of pragmatic approaches to accomplish public ends (Dimock & Dimock, 1969; Waldo, 1955; Wamsley, 1996). These issues have only become more salient as the demands of globalization require administrators to be able to understand and integrate the basic thought processes of a variety of disciplines to devise strategic plans that work. In response to the increased complexity of public administration problems, public administration programs need to adjust their curriculum and encourage “more diverse and broad-based faculty” to provide for a workable “interdisciplinary setting” (Smith, 2008, p. 127). Consciously building skills for integration, however, is an area in which public administration as a field can improve (Breen, Matusitz, & Wan, 2009; Jacobson & Warner, 2008; Smith, 2008).
As an educational field, public administration has a distinct advantage in preparing future leaders to overcome the barriers that arise from the increasing complexity of governance. In addressing these issues, this article seeks to explain how public administrators can begin to adopt an interdisciplinary mind-set in a classroom setting by incorporating a cognitively flexible ethos. Cognitive flexibility is similar to McSwite’s (2001) theory competency, which “means being able to hold incommensurables together in one’s mind and allowing the tension generated between them to stand” (p. 114). This mentality not only allows students and professionals of administration to understand the “linkages and interconnections” of administrative action but also gives them an “experimental attitude toward action” (McSwite, 2001, p. 112).
Building off this approach, cognitive flexibility encourages not only pragmatism and the comprehension of competing epistemological frameworks but also integrating these forms of knowledge in new and innovative ways. In our discussion, we first look at how complex problems of governance require administrators to transcend disciplinary boundaries to address multifaceted problems at unprecedented levels and argue that these particular issues require an interdisciplinary approach. Next, we introduce issues and challenges that may inhibit an interdisciplinary approach. Finally, we explore the concept of cognitive flexibility and examine practical methods for how instructors can begin to integrate a pedagogical strategy of interdisciplinarity in public administration classrooms.
The Realities of Public Administration: Governance and Interdisciplinarity
With the emergence of globalization, fields like public administration have needed to be largely reconceptualized. This necessity is compounded by an increase of transnational problems that require a body of experts in a multitude of jurisdictions to collaborate in a coordinated fashion. In this new era, public administration operates by what Kettl (2002) called a “diffusion of administrative action” (p. 159) and what Goodsell (2006) referred to as “dispersed public action.” Alongside traditional bureaucratic structures, government is also increasingly operating through direct privatization, public–private partnerships, and outsourcing. As public administrators have come to realize that they operate under vertical and horizontal models of governance, they must create and manage networks that include a wide array of experts with various approaches to solving problems (Goldsmith, 2010; Goldsmith & Eggers, 2004; Salamon, 1995). Resulting from these shifts, accountability measures have moved from a legalistic, rule-driven, and bureaucratic form to one that focuses on performance management and market-based standards (Considine, 2002; Romzek, 2000; Weber, 1999). These expectations stress the need for administrators to achieve outcomes and find solutions to difficult social problems in an efficient manner. In this context, Kettl (2002) argued that “it is time to reclaim public administration and refashion it” (p. 25). This reconceptualization also hints at something just as important as—and perhaps deeper than—simply overt values like increased innovation, participation, and efficiency. The economic and social conditions of today encourage new modes of conceptualizing education, learning, and thinking (Forrer, Kee, & Gabriel, 2007; Gee, 2000; Smith, 2008).
This state of affairs requires practical fields like public administration to move consciously toward a state of thoughtful and considered interdisciplinarity. Klein (1990) offered a general and often-cited definition of the term. “Interdisciplinarity,” she says, “is a means of solving problems and answering questions that cannot be satisfactorily addressed using single methods or approaches” (p. 196). Alone, traditional academic disciplines informed by their own methodologies have a limited capacity to solve complex issues that are at the same time both scientific and political. In addition, although the university structure generally favors the strict application of academic boundaries (for financial and administrative concerns, among other reasons), the tradition of academic “silos” operating alone on the same campus needs to be suspended to allow for the proper study of the types of problems found in political and administrative settings. Waldo (1984) encouraged this type of thinking in his belief that public administrators should be generalists. He noted in his seminal work that public administration needs “a new kind of ‘integrator’—an administrator who is a specialist in ‘things in general’” (p. 12).
This sentiment not only calls for administrators to be aware of and understand a broad range of topics, but it also alludes to the capacity to be cognitively flexible—having the ability to bridge and understand how different disciplines and people think and act. For example, a traditional course on program evaluation could nicely fit this model of applying interdisciplinarity to public administration. The measurement of outputs and outcomes of administrative action is critical, especially from a New Public Management (NPM) and interdisciplinary perspective. Both movements are predicated on the idea of solving tough problems in an effective, efficient, and innovative manner. However, these measurements need to be balanced against other evaluative concerns such as legal, ethical, sociological, and democratic ones.
This ethos does partially push back against NPM’s primary concern toward performance management. A student needs to have the cognitive capacity to flexibly understand and move between different areas of assessment. A primary focus on strictly technical achievement and operational efficiency is not adequate in evaluating a program in a constitutional republic (Bumgarner & Newswander, 2009, in press; Molina, 2009; Molina & McKeown, in press). In 1971, the Supreme Court overturned a decision by the Department of Transportation to build a highway through a park in Memphis, Tennessee, noting that the agency had failed to consider the political and environmental ramifications (Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe, 1971). The department was merely concerned with making technical and feasible decisions, so it lost sight of prudence and the purpose of the law. In teaching this interdisciplinary ethos in courses such as program evaluation, students should have an ability and awareness to make judicious decisions in the face of complexity.
Building from this insight, Wamsley (1996) has advocated that public administrators move toward an “applied interdisciplinary” understanding of the field. Although disciplinary specialization has its place in the academy, public administration is not a field that requires a unitary guiding methodological framework to inform its theory and practice. Instead, it would do better with “multiple paradigms and approaches and eclectic theorizing, which provide different ‘lenses’ for seeing our subject from different perspectives” (Wamsley, 1996, p. 366). This approach of relying on multiple paradigms pushes back against the incommensurability thesis, which assumes that paradigms cannot be integrated (Schultz & Hatch, 1996; Weaver & Gioia, 1994; Willmott, 1993). The incommensurability thesis provides “far too fragile a basis for maintaining pluralism in scholarship” (Weaver & Gioia, 1994, p. 584). It refuses to recognize that people are able to move “back and forth between paradigms so that multiple views are held in tension” (Schultz & Hatch, 1996, p. 535).
Moving this debate to public administration, Lan and Anders (2000) noted that consideration of competing paradigms “strengthens, instead of erodes, the future of the field” (p. 162). In contrast, Dobel (2001) took an approach that is rooted more in an interdisciplinary perspective. He argues that paradigms are adversarial in nature, which prevents synthesis and knowledge integration. The goal is to “learn from each other and draw on the knowledge and wisdom of the past as well as the excitement and energy of the present” (Dobel, 2001, p. 171). This ability to bring together knowledge is reflective of the broader mission of public service to help solve public problems. No single discipline has the answer to address the complex administrative problems that include such a diversity of concerns.
In handling the pragmatic realties of administrative issues, Wamsley (1996) recommended that the field should consider and adopt (in part) Waldo’s suggestion of using the study of medicine as an “exemplar” (p. 366). The analogy of medicine is useful because of its applied interdisciplinary approach. Goodman (2008) also recommended the application of problem-based learning, which is used by medical schools. Although this approach is similar to case-based learning, it is slightly different because its main focus is on confronting and solving real problems, not just understanding the details and contexts of a situation (Duch, 2001). Although both approaches are useful, Goodman (2008) argued that student learning rooted in problems and complexity enables public administration education to better equip its students with the analytical and practical skills necessary to deal with public issues. Like medicine, public administration is not purely a scientific field of study but a deeply pragmatic field that requires practitioners to make responsible and informed decisions as they rely on and make prudent use of a multitude of sources to address complex problems (Henry, Goodsell, Lynn, Stivers, & Wamsley, 2009).
Of course, other fields also provide some guidance for how to organize an integrative and cohesive curriculum. In addition to the comparison to medicine, Behn (1996) argued that the field of public administration is more like engineering than art or science. In particular, engineering education has taken great strides in reaching beyond its disciplinary border to include other fields. Engineering education as a field has sought to achieve this ideal through innovative course offerings that mix engineering, design, marketing, biology, and communication students in a team setting (Borrego, Newswander, McNair, McGinnis, & Paretti, 2009; McNair, Newswander, Boden, & Borrego, 2011). In one particular class, undergraduate students divided into project teams to work on two problems: how to evaluate the environmental impact of production waste and how to design a water filter for developing counties. Students were also individually tasked with creating two concept maps that were assessed by faculty members who came from different departments to score them together (Borrego et al., 2009). The Department at Industrial Engineering at the University of Pittsburg has also designed a curriculum geared around the principles of integration. To ensure that learning has occurred, its senior capstone course requires students to synthesize different concepts (Norman, Besterfield-Sacre, Bidanada, Needy, & Rajgopal, 2005).
Examples like these do not assume that these academic disciplines are not dogmatic, axiomatic, and insular in individual instances. However, they have also demonstrated the capacity to move out from behind disciplinary walls and extend and build knowledge in new ways by relying on different approaches to solve problems. Public administration would do well to imitate the interdisciplinary natures of these and other fields, and to a certain extent, it already does so as it borrows students, faculty, funding, and epistemologies from related fields.
Issues With Interdisciplinary Integration as a General Pedagogical Strategy
The move toward interdisciplinary research in previously isolated fields is a result of a multitude of factors, including economic pressures, professional necessities, and academic considerations (Klein, 1996). Within academia, the growth of interdisciplinarity is partially the result of cross fertilization between disciplines and the search to find answers to complex problems (Newell & Klein, 1996). Divisions between relevant disciplines have to be bridged and boundaries across the university (and with other supporting agencies and institutions) must be broken down to address difficult and fragmented problems such as global climate change, renewable energy, health care, education, and a host of other complex administrative/public concerns. The challenge to address these problems through an interdisciplinary mind-set also contributes to increased levels of student learning (Hursh, Haas, & Moore, 1983; Lattuca, Voight, & Fath, 2004). Interdisciplinary education imparts “a number of valuable skills to students,” especially the ability to cope “with complexity, appreciation of diverse viewpoints, awareness of bias, and suspicion of authority” (Szostak, 2003, p. 48). As a result, universities are slowly, but increasingly, moving in the direction of interdisciplinarity (Rhoten, Boix Mansilla, Chun, & Klein, 2006).
One of the goals of public administration should be to thoughtfully integrate seemingly disparate disciplinary perspectives in a manner that allows for knowledge to be shared and implemented in innovative ways (Meek, 2001; Newell & Meek, 1997). However, there are two significant issues that must be confronted to maximize an interdisciplinary ethos. First, interdisciplinary interaction among students of different majors is hindered by a lack of shared epistemologies and different levels of expertise. The inability to recognize a common goal may result in cognitive inflexibility, an inability to demonstrate critical awareness, and a failure to link to other disciplines to further advance knowledge of existing practices. The Committee on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research (2004) noted that a “challenge in interdisciplinary work is to develop expertise in more than one area” (p. 189). A lack of knowledge in multiple core areas reflects a weakness that perhaps can be overcome with increased interaction and time spent with an interdisciplinary group (Committee on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research, 2004). Although these challenges are difficult to solve, it is essential to develop individuals “who can serve as both ‘hubs’ and ‘bridges’” between different experts (Rhoten, 2006, p. 9). This idea is reflected by Waldo’s desire to create “generalist” public administrators who have the capacity to serve as these hubs because they are rooted in a pluralistic mode of thinking and acting.
Second and perhaps more important, the lack of instructors trained in interdisciplinary thinking is a significant barrier (Schilling, 2001). Most educators are trained in disciplinary settings that encourage specialization. The path of career development in academia further reinforces this thinking (Mallon, 2006). This specialization is a result of the cafeteria model of higher education, “in which one acquires discrete bodies of information or useful skills” (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985, p. 279). Under this silo model, attempts to integrate discrete bodies of knowledge are challenging. Professionals and educators may also have diverse assumptions, norms, and epistemic frameworks for how problems are addressed due to their own educational training that produce conflict and tend to reinforce institutional identities, rather than affinity-based understandings (Gee, 2000). In many regards, civil service development follows a similar track of specialization and isolation. An interdisciplinary ethos challenges the traditional “‘stovepipe’ model of career development,” which “creates narrow specialists” and fails to “develop the broader perspectives” of civil servants (Ingraham, 1995, p. 11).
Furthermore, attempts to find shared understandings across academic departments “often turns into a battle between disciplines in which the idea of a substantive core is lost” (Bellah et al., 1985, p. 279). This problem can partially be overcome in an interdisciplinary classroom setting that focuses on problems, not grand attempts to unify knowledge (Newell, 2006). Professors are increasingly being pushed toward an interdisciplinary mind-set because of “the character of problems currently under study, many of which require the combined efforts of scholars trained in different disciplines” (Rhoten, 2006, p. 2). Although these ideas will not solve disciplinary divisions, they do alert educators to the presence and significance of interdisciplinary questions, especially in research and classroom settings.
Michael Crow, current president of Arizona State University (ASU) and a trained public administrator himself, is working to disintegrate the barriers of disciplinary education in what he calls the New American University (ASU, 2010). Since taking office in 2002, he has established 21 new transdisciplinary schools, each of which focus on problem solving. For example, the School of Sustainability brings together professors of ecology, economy, literature, sociology, biology, mathematics, law, urban development, and many other specialties. In this school, students and faculty work to solve real-world problems, such as energy, water quality and scarcity, social transformations, and policy and governance. The result of students coming together to learn without disciplinary boundaries is “research that contributes to the public good” (ASU, 2010).
The vision of Crow’s New American University is similar to ideas posed by Boix Mansilla and Duraising (2007), who advocate for disciplinary grounding, integration, and critical awareness as part of an interdisciplinary program of education. Critical awareness is an especially important factor that addresses the way that an individual understands and makes sense of various types of knowledge. The principle of using a variety of epistemologies is imperative to the new system of learning at ASU. For example, in its College of Nursing and Health Innovation, traditional nursing students work alongside architects, policy experts, and professors of business with the common goal of bettering the patient experience. The idea is that for future nurses to fully understand the patient, they must first understand the politics, policy, and infrastructure of the health care systems under which they must operate. This “big picture” is meant to be a transformative element in the educational experience.
Implemented in this way, critical awareness allows professors to use their judgment to weigh options and reason through various aspects of a problem, which is especially important to public administrators. This mode of thinking requires “mental flexibility in shifting back and forth between part and whole; breadth of knowledge and a feel where knowledge is incomplete; judiciousness in reconciling competing claims; rhetorical analysis; and ethical sensitivity” (Newell, 2006, p. 250). In addition, critical awareness as part of an interdisciplinary approach emphasizes holistic thinking—looking at the bigger picture, valuing outside perspectives, and enlarging possible horizons of knowledge (Ivanitskya, Clark, Montgomery, & Primeau, 2002; Repko, 2008). Students and professors who are able to think in such a broad way about problems and possible solutions are an asset not only to the academic community but also to real-world situations.
Implementing a Cognitively Flexible Approach in Public Administration Curriculum
Once a value for interdisciplinary comprehension and integration is established, the question of how to practically apply such an approach to pedagogy remains. The theory of cognitive flexibility offers some guidance for how educators in the field might seek to prepare tomorrow’s public administrators. Cognitive flexibility is a theory of the ability of a person’s mind to shift among varying (and even seemingly contradictory) ways of knowing. According to Spiro, Coulson, Feltovich, and Anderson (1988), cognitive flexibility gives an individual the capability of changing his or her epistemic “lens” to suit various contexts; for example, a public administrator is able to think like a scientist when necessary. This emphasis on the varying applicability of knowledge, therefore, is in contradistinction to theories that argue that knowledge is strictly domain specific (Royce, 1959). In addition to the principles, the theory of cognitive flexibility also focuses on cognitive training as the main facilitator of or roadblock to an individual’s ability to shift epistemologies according to context. Students must not only be given the appropriate knowledge, but they must also be taught to use that knowledge in practical situations.
This type of training can be accomplished in a number of ways. For example, Spiro et al. (1988) suggested that covering the same content in different ways can increase cognitive flexibility. In this case, a course on administrative ethics could look at how to answer a particular problem using a constitutional standpoint (Rohr, 1989), a philosophical approach (Aristotle, 2003), a social-psychological understanding (Zimbardo, 2008), and a political–philosophical interpretation (Rawls, 1971). As they seek to implement these approaches, instructors should also integrate and draw connections to provide a more nuanced context to deal with complex problems. A familiarity with the basic principles and epistemologies of a number of disciplines will also help to facilitate public administrators in making better policy decisions and will encourage improved working relationships between administrators and those on whom they must rely.
Newbold (2008) pointed in this direction as she refers to one way that public affair programs can approach organizational theory. Specifically, she recommends “connecting organization theory to the constitutional principles of federalism and separation of power,” although she allows that “this approach does not suggest that other equally effective and meaningful ways do not exist for teaching, explaining, predicting, and understanding organization theory in the context of public affairs education” (2008, p. 348). What is important is that students understand organizational theory not just from a multitude of perspectives—which may include postmodern approaches, a constitutional outlook, institutional theories, and rational choice models—but that they also consider how these approaches relate to each other in dynamic ways.
Real-world examples demonstrate how this type of integration can benefit various professional and academic situations. First, the Secret Service has tended to privilege a generalist ethos over a specialist mentality, even though its two primary missions of counterfeiting and protection seem to have no relationship to each other. The agency adheres to “the belief that knowledge and experiences gained in each rotation contributes to overall agent effectiveness, and will be a valuable asset in future assignments” (Institute of Medicine, 1981, p. 82). Personnel decisions such as motivation and promotion are based on this generalist conception of the necessity of integrating experiences from a multitude of perspectives and roles (Carney & Baker, 1986; Institute of Medicine, 1984). Because of the variety of tasks they must perform, it is not unexpected that “there has been a tendency to foster a ‘generalist’ model for Special Agents whereby, over the course of his or her career, the agent receives a variety of assignments” (Carney & Baker, 1986, p. 446). This diversity, according to former Director Ralph Basham, has permitted the agency to “become fully interdependent and completely integrated” as it permits agents to synthesize their investigative skills with their protective missions (U.S. Congress, 2004).
Such integrative thinking can also promote the field of public administration. For example, the Blacksburg Manifesto, which was a call to refound public administration on democratic and republican principles, was also deeply integrative (Wamsley et al., 1990; Wamsley & Wolf, 1996). In response to a perceived legitimacy crisis, the Refounding offered an alternative framework to justifying public administration in the American context by integrating different philosophical assumptions. Scholars ranged from the high-modernist to feminist to postmodern perspectives. Even though the authors held different philosophical assumptions (from Rohr to White), and there were significant and minor differences among the authors, the Refounding project, in general, incorporated their different epistemological approaches into a project that synthesized differences. This cognitively flexible approach yielded new ideas and understandings of the role of the civil servant in a Constitutional Republic.
Important as it is, the ability to change or challenge one’s disciplinary epistemologies or even seriously consider other ways of knowing is not always easy. In fact, one major roadblock to cognitive flexibility is that “[o]ften individuals are not aware of their epistemological beliefs” (Limon, 2006). Therefore, to overcome the barriers confronted by different ways of knowing and valuing truth in interdisciplinary environments, one must first be able to identify his or her own epistemological framework and be aware of the strengths and weaknesses inherent in it. For a public administrator, this means realizing that the methods most commonly used in the field are not the only ways to accumulate understanding or solve problems. This recognition requires a broadly interdisciplinary educational background, especially in regards to methodology. After one is able to recognize and properly appreciate that different ways of knowing exist, he or she must then learn enough about them to respect them and ask appropriate questions. This is where training begins to come in. Training is again integral to the final step toward cognitive flexibility, which is the integration of a new epistemology into a project.
Project Teams
To encourage cognitive flexibility in a classroom setting, instructors can encourage students to think and act critically through specialized exercises in teams and a case study approach as starting points. First, team formation, building, and functioning are critical in an educational environment that seeks to build interdisciplinary identities. Cohen and Bailey (1997) point out that there are four different types of teams that can be used in a multitude of contexts to carry out a particular set of objectives: work teams, parallel teams, project teams, and management teams. Even though any of these teams can be interdisciplinary, project teams are explicitly used to take advantage of different experiences and expertise to find potential solutions to unwieldy problems. In contrast to work teams that often rely on members from a single discipline to solve problems, Makin, Cohen, and Bikson (1996) noted that project teams are created to be cross-functional to handle nonrepetitive tasks. In public administration, this approach would require managers, street-level bureaucrats, policy analysts, and others to come together and integrate their experience and expertise in innovative and perhaps even unintended ways. Through this sort of team approach to learning, the benefits of an interdisciplinary ethos rooted in cognitive flexibility enable new solutions in an organizational setting. When project teams are able to operate in a space that is free from extensive bureaucratic control, they are also allowed the discretion to effectively work out problems.
These types of teams can be used in a classroom setting to teach interdisciplinarity as a skill that requires cognitive flexibility. For example, project teams have been used in one undergraduate classroom composed of business majors, marketing students, engineers, and industrial design students (McNair et al., 2011). Students were strategically placed in groups of five to six students with a mix of disciplinary expertise to work on developing a smart dorm room for students with special needs. Although there were some difficulties and growing pains, each group began to learn and rely on the expertise of each discipline and sought to successfully integrate their areas of expertise in developing ideas and products. Students were not only expected to focus on disciplinary projects such as developing a marketing plan, a design portfolio, and a feasibility study, but they were also expected to show as a group how each of these areas could be integrated into one cohesive whole. Instructors from marketing, design, and engineering oversaw and managed group interaction to ensure that interdisciplinary integration was taking place. A final project and presentation was required to show the instructors how students had integrated knowledge.
This type of approach can be useful in most public administration classrooms because they often address complex problems that require an interdisciplinary mind-set and already are made up of a group of students with various disciplinary, practical, and educational backgrounds. This range of experience among students should encourage instructors to take full advantage of the diversity. For example, practices like this could be applied to a typical budgeting class. Miller and Wamsley (1999) argued that budgeting scenarios are often embedded in a multifaceted context that includes management, political, legal, and ethical concerns. In dealing with budgetary problems, an instructor could create project teams composed of peers with different disciplinary and methodological backgrounds and allow them to coordinate and bring together their own unique perspectives. Focusing on a particular problem teaches students how to think and act differently. Project teams enable students to comprehend from a theoretical and practical perspective the difficulty of understanding different methods and epistemologies, but they also provide a context for having them to work together in a coordinated fashion to integrate their knowledge domains.
Experiential Learning
Second, experiential learning exercises can also be used to help facilitate cognitive flexibility. Building off the work of Dewey and Lewin, Kolb (1984) described experiential learning as a “holistic integrative perspective on learning that combines experience, perception, cognition, and behavior” (p. 21). It is a “process where knowledge is created through the transformation of experiences” (1984, p. 38). Case studies, games, decision-making exercises, organized debates, assessment exercises, and group projects can be used to increase student participation in the learning process. Although experiential learning techniques are often associated within disciplinary methods, they still can be used in an interdisciplinary setting to promote learning objectives. Efforts at experiential learning enable professors to help students connect theory and practice in a more informative way by having them experiencing, interacting, and dealing with questions on a pragmatic level. This teaching approach can be applied to disciplinary, multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary approaches to learning. In fact, Klein (2010) provided Edgewood College as an example of how an institution is able to integrate “interdisciplinary study with experiential learning.” The benefits of this approach are rooted in the idea that students can begin to experience the “process of adjusting to continual change while striving toward the solution of specific problems” (DeMartini, 1983, p. 22).
This learning objective is similar to McSwite’s idea of theory competence, which relies on an experimental method with a particular preference toward a case study approach to better understand how to address problems in a public context (McSwite, 1997, 2001; White & McSwain, 1990). In the second dimension of theory competence, McSwite recommends that “administrators should have the ability to search out and understand the underlying codes that govern the situations in which they find themselves” (McSwite, 2001, p. 113). This ability requires administrators to read a situation such as a case study text (White & McSwain, 1990). In working out potential mitigating solutions to complex social and political problems, administrators need to be willing to “consult, to listen to, and to consider thoroughly and genuinely all the technical information, political advice, and personal feelings” (White & McSwain, 1990, p. 13). At its core, this is interdisciplinarity thinking rooted in cognitive flexibility that is already found in many public administration courses, especially in their reliance on case studies from Electronic Hallway, the Harvard Business School, and the Kennedy School. Like project teams, case studies are an effective way to achieve experiential learning. As a result of this learning focus, public affairs educated professionals need to have the capacity to understand the multitude of dimensions that exist within any given situation and be able to decipher a reasonable course of action grounded in the public interest.
In one of its landmark cases concerning qualified immunity and deference, the Supreme Court echoed this reasoning. In the majority opinion in Boyle v. United Technologies Corp. (1988), the court stated the “discretionary function” of administration of public functions rested on questions that involved not just “merely engineering analysis, but judgment as to balancing of many technical, military, and even social considerations.” The act of administration requires that civil servants be trained with a capacity to analyze a complex situation along several facets, which requires a basic ability to perceive multiple ways of knowing and handling a situation in a proper way that considers these dimensions. This approach to training goes back to Behn’s consideration of treating the process of public administration as an engineer. Science must be informed by art, and art must be grounded in reasonable facts. The connection between choices and decision must be filtered through a complex array of milieus to allow the decision maker to consider and integrate competing forms of knowledge.
Team Teaching
Third, cognitive flexibility in the classroom can also be enhanced through the use of team teaching, which is increasingly being used in interdisciplinary settings (Buckley, 2000; Davis, 1995). The basic idea of team teaching “involves two or more professors collaborating in significant ways” to synthesize “disciplinary perspectives” (Davis, 1995, p. 5). Parsing out the underlying purposes of this method, Davis (1995) argued that the “goal of team teaching is a high level of integration and that a high level of collaboration will be required to achieve the goal” (p. 45). This level of collaboration and integration, however, is predicated on faculty members’ willingness to actively learn about other disciplines and recognize that complex material is often best taught not by a single teacher but an “interdisciplinary problem-solving group” (Petrie, 1986, 1992).
Moving forward with team teaching models, educational environments from K-12 to the university setting have relied on this approach to teach information that requires multiple voices (Petrie, 1992; Sandholtz, 2000; Shibley, 2006). Buckley (2000) noted that “a great advantage of interdisciplinary team teaching is demonstrating the relationships between the subject areas studied, opening both teachers and students to new points of view, new questions, and new discoveries” (p. 47). However, this is not to argue that team teaching does not have significant issues and problems, especially in terms of course management and delivery (Shibley, 2006). Professorial autonomy in the classroom is often a barrier that prevents more collaboration between colleagues (Sandholtz, 2000).
Some programs have had success in overcoming such issues through team-taught courses. For example, Virginia Tech’s program, the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT), brings students together from a wide range of disciplines and allows for major and minor specialties in sociology, politics, ethics, and culture, though the degree requires some experience in multiple fields. Faculty are housed in their separate departments, but come together to teach courses for the program from 4 core disciplines and over 14 ancillary disciplines. Students are required to take 12 hr of team-taught courses, which focus on topics such as “democracy” from the perspective of professors from five different disciplines (ASPECT, 2010).
This effort to help students to both understand and integrate different methods would also work well in a capstone course in a public administration program. In this setting, a team-taught course could not only help reinforce foundational material in budgeting, personnel, theory, and other areas but also impart how the field can begin to use and integrate knowledge from different areas to solve administrative problems. The content of such a class would be determined by a program’s focus and instructors’ expertise in various areas. However, such an approach would not only allow professors to teach in their areas of research but also allow them to contribute how their knowledge base could be used to address problems in other areas. The level of interaction that could occur between professors and advanced graduate students would serve to fulfill the basic goals of team teaching and help students and professors achieve an interdisciplinary mind-set.
Curriculum
Finally, cognitive flexibility could be partially achieved through public administration curriculum. However, this last suggestion is the most difficult to operationalize. There are so many factors that determine the makeup of public administration programs that it would be irresponsible to make specific content requirements. The Task Force on Educating for Excellence states that public administration “programs are meant to be unique, and should be” (Henry et al., 2009, p. 120). This diversity is a result of the fact that “public administration is a multi-disciplinary, multi-paradigmatic field” (Henry et al., 2009, p. 128).
Although the field is inherently multiparadigmatic, there is a question of whether it should be multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary. Some scholars differentiate between multidisciplinary work, which is often a combination of separate disciplinary components or team members, and interdisciplinary work, which is more integrative (Committee on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research, 2004). In moving away from the Task Force’s argument concerning a multidisciplinary framework, the field should increasingly embrace an interdisciplinary mind-set rooted in cognitive flexibility. This approach stipulates that complex problems in modern governance settings require administrators to integrate knowledge. A problem-solving focus fits in nicely with interdisciplinary models of education (Hursh et al., 1983; Petrie, 1992). In particular, an interdisciplinary mind-set requires multiple perspectives that can cross, bridge, and link across fields (Rhoten, 2006).
By accepting this mind-set, each program can develop its own set of curriculum that fits its areas of expertise and general National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) accrediting guidelines. The Task Force reinforces this notion by noting that programs need “to reassert and re-clarify [their] mission and values” to specify “what they can best equip students to do” (Henry et al., 2009, p. 121). This level of specificity allows programs to focus on certain skills. In this regard, “curricula for the degrees should be different or distinct enough to maximize the job-effectiveness of the degree recipients’ chosen career path” (Henry et al., 2009, p. 121). This is one of the reasons why NASPAA does neither “specify courses that must be taught nor do they suggest how much coverage should be given to a specific topic” (Piskulich & Mandell, 2007, p. 1).
However, NASPAA should slightly modify its universally required competencies to not just include the ability to synthesize knowledge but also expect students to be exposed to interdisciplinary thinking. Each program will still have to tailor the application of interdisciplinary knowledge based on their faculty expertise, program mission, and collaboration with other departments. A program invested in strong quantitative methods will have different requirements and expectations than a program rooted in a normative position. As a result of these differences, there is a possibility that they will be looking at different problems which will require different areas of knowledge to solve.
Even with these considerations, general suggestions can be offered to help programs move in the direction of interdisciplinarity. This is important because “curriculum competencies adopted should cut across the different types of programs” (Piskulich & Mandell, 2007, p. 3). First, core classes in public administration could emphasize interdisciplinarity and cognitive flexibility as critical concepts in addressing administrative problems. As noted earlier, classes such as program evaluation, organization theory, budgeting, and ethics fit naturally into this mode of thinking. In this context, learning outcomes can include an enhanced capacity for students to learn how to consider a diversity of perspectives and synthesize different knowledge domains. Second, programs could offer particular concentrations in interdisciplinary thinking. Although this would require faculty consultation, students could pick and choose electives across academic departments that would help them address a particular research area. It would also help professors partner with other departments on campus.
Third, professors could use interdisciplinary strategies such as project teams, experiential-learning techniques, and team teaching. In fact, the use of teams, experiential learning, and team teaching can be fused together in a classroom setting. Project teams can be assigned an experiential-learning exercise, such as a case study, as a way to help students consider and understand the complexities of an interdisciplinary environment. Other disciplines, notably marketing education and engineering education, have relied on these concepts in a classroom setting (Bobbitt, Inks, Kemp, & Mayo, 2000; Henke, 1985; McNair et al., 2011). These examples demonstrate how professors from different disciplines can work together in a coordinated fashion to help students complete their projects. Although the learning curve might be steep at first, it is important for professors to adapt to changing circumstances that may benefit students’ intellectual and professional development. Institutional training could also be beneficial in helping instructors move in this direction.
Fourth, programs could use summative assessment standards, such as a capstone class, a professional report, preliminary exams, comprehensive exams, and so on, to address how much interdisciplinary integration has taken place. Any of these methods would be suitable to assess a student’s ability to connect and integrate ideas across the field of public administration. For example, the capstone course for the Master of Public Administration program at ASU is designed to help students bring together core curriculum concepts and use these administrative concepts to address real-world issues. The professional report for the MPA program at the University of South Dakota is also designed around the task of addressing a specific administrative problem. A couple of requirements in this report are that students show that they are first capable of connecting knowledge from core classes and then apply that knowledge to deal with a specific administrative problem. These problem-centered approaches mirror the process of understanding how to be interdisciplinary thinkers. In another mode of assessment that focuses on integrating knowledge, the preliminary exams at the Center for Public Administration and Policy at Virginia Tech tested PhD students in five categories: theory/context, ethics, organization theory/behavior, management, and policy. This approach equipped students with the tools to not only emulate Waldo’s generalist standard but also to learn how to integrate knowledge from the field. Overall, each of these suggestions could be used separately or together. What they strive to do is offer practical strategies for integrating interdisciplinary values of cognitive flexibility into the public administration classroom.
Conclusion
In a field that has no singular center, it is critical that public administration “provide different ‘lenses’ for seeing our subject from different perspectives” (Wamsley, 1996, p. 366). The awareness that public administration needs multiple paradigms and epistemologies to help manage burgeoning public and political problems is a critical first step. For practical considerations, it is imperative that students and professionals of public administration be able to examine, cross, and use multiple paradigms to accomplish the common good. However, disciplinary grounding and critical awareness need to be accompanied by a conscious capacity to integrate knowledge domains in new ways to better handle public problems. This ethos fits an administrative environment that demands increased levels of performance and accountability. To better make sense of this condition, we have offered some suggestions that encourage cognitive flexibility as a means of dealing with governance issues that are rooted in complexity. In fact, the framework of cognitive flexibility is another reminder that the field of public administration should be freed from dogmatic allegiances to paradigm incommensurability.
Scholars, practitioners, and students of public administration should seek to freely understand and implement knowledge that best suits a particular situation. Speaking specifically of incorporating such practices, engineering education scholars Bordogna, Fromm, and Ernst (1993) pointed out the importance of integrating knowledge in unique ways. According to them,
The ability to make connections among seemingly disparate discoveries, events, and trends and to integrate them in ways that benefit the world community will be the hallmark of modern leaders. [Those leaders] must be skilled at synthesis as well as analysis, and they must be technologically astute. (Bordogna et al., 1993, p. 4)
Furthermore, the kind of integrative environment which will foster this kind of leader must be created “[w]ithin university communities, in particular” (Bordogna et al., 1993, p. 4). Such an attitude combines the importance of disciplinary grounding, critical awareness, cognitive flexibility, and the ideal of public service.
Public administration ought to continue to be a borrowing field, but it ought to borrow consciously in a manner that seeks to build and synthesize knowledge to address multifaceted problems. The capacity for professors and students to both understand and experience cognitive flexibility is imperative to public administration and necessitates particular attention from educators. However, there are limitations to this approach. Most professors are trained in a disciplinary context and work within traditional disciplinary departments. This prevents the grounding of interdisciplinary research. Even with this realization, an incremental approach can be adopted. There is a growing recognition from the institutional to the student level that interdisciplinary skills are needed in the classroom. As a result, integrative skills can be gradually advanced through the introduction of teamwork-based projects, experiential-learning activities, capstone classes, and other suggestions as outlined above. Additionally, educators may turn to the students with their varied professional, educational, and personal backgrounds for a rich approach to learning and integration in the classroom. By becoming more aware of the inherent strengths of public administration, educators will better be able to equip students to become innovative leaders capable of facing the problems of an increasingly complex world.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.