Special issue on the teaching–research nexus in public administration curricula

Research and teaching are the main substantive activities of university staff members. How are both areas connected to each other? What is the role of research in teaching? How can research be used to improve the quality and impact of teaching? This is exactly what this special issue of Teaching Public Administration is about. Everybody will agree that one of the core tasks of teaching staff at the public administration departments of universities consists of conducting and publishing research, as well as teaching students about the discipline. However, research and teaching do not always seem to match. Life inside the classroom seems to be becoming increasingly detached from the research that is being undertaken by the teachers themselves. However, students could greatly benefit from a stronger connection between research and teaching. First of all, a connection between or the integration of research and teaching may help students to become research-minded and to perform actual research more adequately. Methods courses and dedicated research assignments are, of course, essential, but more inclusive integration of research into teaching may help students to gain a better feeling for which methods could or should be used when, and for how data may be interpreted. Secondly, a research orientation in teaching may help students to become more critical and reflexive. On an academic level, ‘knowledge’ should not be taken for granted, but its base, presuppositions and meaning, should be subject to debate. Students should socialize in a culture in which such debate, and their creative participation in it, is self-evident. The purpose of this special issue is to bring together contributions that deal with issues on incorporating research into teaching programs.

The issue has been compiled by a group of higher-education specialists in public administration, from a number of northern European countries and from California, USA. For several years now, authors from the northern European countries have been participating in an annual three-day workshop called the Copenhagen Forum. The Copenhagen Forum was founded in 1996 and is named after the intellectual, and often physical, home for the workshops, i.e. the Copenhagen Business School – one of the largest such schools in the world and home to one of the most prestigious Master’s in Public Administration programs. All contributors to this special issue have many years of experience in teaching and managing mid-career master’s programs in public administration, as well as many years of experience in conducting research in the public sector. As such, all contributions in this issue focus on how the combination of research and teaching is, or could be, applied in (mid-career) master’s programs in public administration.

In the first article of the series, Quinn extensively describes what the research and teaching nexus is, and what the conceptual and instrumental arguments are for linking research and teaching. She also describes how universities competing for higher rankings, driven by the limiting ranking systems that champion research over teaching, could improve their institutional profile-building by a more profound research–teaching nexus e.g. due to its applied nature, public management education can demonstrate its impact and relevance. For mid-career management program students, i.e. public professionals/practitioners, learning about research methods and critical thinking not only enables them to carry out research but also to know the implications of the research for their practice. This is in line with Knassmuller and Meyer’s article, which elaborates on the relationship between academics and practitioners and the specific role of education. Science, education and practice have different frames of reference. These differing reference frames can be used to develop reflexive skills in both academics and practitioners by a process of reinterpretation of these differences in the classroom. In this manner, a collaborative endeavor in the classroom is created, i.e. engaged learning through engaged scholarship. This means that facilitators that speak the language of both practice and science are needed. Practitioners need to be able to recognize and transmit implications of scientific analysis for practical problems. Academics need to engage in practical forms of thinking. In other words, the active engagement of both academics and practitioners is needed to enhance the relevance of research in the classroom.

The articles by Oldfield (‘Another look at research’) and Godwin and Meek (‘The scholarly practitioner’) address exactly how academics and practitioners make research relevant in the classroom. Oldfield explores how the experiences of course participants in mid-career programs can inform course content and, as such, contribute to the value of teaching. This in turn not only informs the participants how to deal with their challenges they face in their day-to-day life as public managers, but also to challenge current practices and assumptions. By articulating problems in a safe environment such as the classroom, participants will learn how to formulate practice-oriented analytic questions, develop well-found solutions and possibly change their daily practice accordingly. Godwin and Meek describe how the Master of Public Administration and the Doctor of Public Administration programs at Laverne University, USA, address the combination of academics, research and practice. For these programs, more of a practice-to-theory approach and experiential learning are critical to the participant’s development, i.e. civic professionals in complex public-sector environments. For the participants to learn to be reflective, several types of connections occur across their programs; e.g. research in class but also research with students.

These connections between research and teaching, and involving students in research and research-mindedness, also occur in the contributions by Notten and Nielsen, who reflect upon their own personal practices and experiences. Notten’s article discusses how teaching, research and innovation are consciously connected in the two-year part-time master’s course that he was involved in at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. He argues that the students should become researchers and innovators; they must know the dilemmas of public administration and deal with them. He describes his experiences in the Urban Education Master’s Program and his research, and supports his approach by referring to a report by the Dutch Scientific Council of Government Policy on how to promote a learning economy. Nielsen was involved in the merger of two departments in a hospital in Denmark. Based on this personal experience, he first delineates the methods used to help the merger process, and then he explores the possibilities of how the methods applied in the case study can be transferred to a course at the mid-career master’s program at Copenhagen Business School. In this manner, the working of the methods in his case study could be applied as a kind of collaborative or interactive research in the home organizations of the participants.

The idea of starting classroom reflection on the research–teaching nexus in research experience and outcomes is also fundamental in the article by Barber and Luke. Their methodological approach is to start from the viewpoint of research itself. They evaluate the changing environment of higher education and how research adds value to public administration teaching. They take 10 pieces of published research and assess their applicability in teaching. Based on these works, they show that students can develop research habits and knowledge dissemination; but it goes further than that, as they show that students also learn from indirect research results. The underlying theoretical themes from these articles are directly transferrable to the experiences of students, irrespective of the knowledge outcome of the works. In other words, academic research offers an opportunity for thematic interpretation, and the successful integration of research into teaching can stimulate responses to practical, real-life problems. In the last article of the series, Van der Meer and Marks provide an inventory of the functions of research in teaching public administration. They provide a model for the analysis of the role of research in teaching and for analyzing how and why teaching has changed over time from a teacher-focused to a more student-focused approach, connected with a move towards socially constructed knowledge and away from objective knowledge. This model could provide the focus for further research on this topic.

All articles demonstrate that there are many ways of linking research and practice. The linking of research and teaching may generate positive outcomes for students, but it will also enhance the societal impact of research by producing scientifically produced, practice-oriented knowledge for practitioners. Mid-career programs that integrate research and teaching may enhance the ability of students to assess situations and problems, apply knowledge and analytic methods to tackle these problems, and reflect on the meaning of knowledge and methods. Taken as a collection, this series of articles aims to demonstrate the many benefits the integration of research and teaching may have for mid-career programs in public administration. But, of course, these ideas go beyond mid-career programs. Many bachelor’s and master’s programs could benefit from a closer link between research and teaching. These links need deliberate attention to accomplish a fruitful integration. We hope the special issue proves valuable in provoking further debate and the exchange of ideas and experiences on this important theme.