Introduction: Special issue on curriculum design in public administration education: Challenges and perspectives

The idea for this special issue emerged out of conversations that occurred on the margins of the International Research Society for Public Management’s panels on education and training. These discussions were wide-ranging, but their common point was a shared interest in the content of public administration and public policy programmes, particularly post-graduate programmes like the Masters of Public Administration (MPA). In other words, these were discussions about curriculum.

Though there are several definitions of curriculum in the literature about higher education (Dillion, 2009; Hurlimann et al., 2013; O’Neill, 2015; Petkuté, 2016; Whelahan, 2015), most agree that it consists of the organization and structuring of disciplinary knowledge to enable learning. Curriculum is also about pedagogy and how best to adapt the methods of teaching and learning to convey disciplinary knowledge. Finally, curriculum is also about enabling students to acquire skills, competencies, and behaviours that are relevant to their disciplinary practice. The element of practice is particularly important as most MPA and MPP programmes have a professional orientation toward careers in government and the public sector. At the same time, international student mobility and availability of distance learning programmes -(with or without a residential component), curriculum perceived to be innovative or job-ready is one way by which public administration programmes differentiate themselves in a competitive market for students.

The interest in the public administration curriculum in higher education is not new (see for example, (Reichard, 1998), but it has gained increasing interest among administrators and faculty in light of the changing labour market and context of professional application of degree knowledge. The response has been to develop a curriculum that combines the skills traditionally associated with the academy, for example, critical thinking, research and writing, and the skills increasingly sought by the labour market. The articles published in this special issue reflect these changes.

In curating this special issue particular attention was paid to including an international array of perspectives about curriculum practices and approaches. To this end, this issue features articles by colleagues from the United States, Turkey, Germany, and Canada.

A common theme across all of the articles published here is that of transformation and change and how the public administration curriculum has adapted to reflect these transformations and changes.

Carroll’s article focuses on the integration of entrepreneurship as a topic in the MPA core curriculum in the United States. As the author notes, entrepreneurship has been a feature of the public administration landscape since the publication of Reinventing Government in 1992. Drawing on a sample of 174 NASPAA accredited MPA programmes, the author focused on the core courses and observed that, contrary to expectations, the topic of entrepreneurship was found in only a handful of programmes reviewed. An unintended, though important, finding from Carroll’s study was the remarkable consistency in the core content of accredited MPA programmes over the past 25 years. This leads Carroll to observe that a rethink may be necessary to ensure that public administration programmes reflect the contemporary practice of public administration but also the changing needs of the organizations that will employ MPA graduates.

The inclusion of entrepreneurship within the curriculum of public administration is also the focus of Grimm and Bock’s article which explores the criticality of including the different dimensions of entrepreneurship as an asset and feature of public administration and public policy curriculum. Grimm and Bock base their study on a content review of 54 German and 50 US public administration and public policy programmes. Two case studies featuring the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy and Harvard Kennedy School are discussed as examples of best practices in the inclusion of how to include entrepreneurship into curricula. Finding that entrepreneurship remains rare in the curriculum of US and German public administration programmes, despite high demand for such inclusion. The authors conclude with recommendations to resolve the gap between offer and demand that they observed.

The transformation in the practice of public administration spurred by the accelerating adoption of information technology is the topic of Overton and Kleinschmit’s article. For the authors, the increasing prevalence of data-driven public administration calls for new teaching and learning strategies to overcome the apprehended data-skills gap leading them to propose the Data Science Literacy Framework, a heuristic for incorporating data science principles into public administration programs. As Overton and Kleinschmit note, the data-skills gap in the public sector can only be overcome by ensuring that students emerging from public administration programmes are data literate. With this in mind, the Framework proposed by the authors weaves its competencies into normal public administration programmes.

The challenge of providing public administration students with the new skills required by the changing nature of the public sector is also discussed by Karkin and Gurses. Writing about Turkey they explore how the content of Turkish public administration programmes accounts for the transformations in the country’s public sector. Working with a sample of 16 public administration departments, roughly 10% of all of Turkey’s departments, the authors observe the existence of a void between curriculum and the scope and nature of the transformations taking place. As observed by Karkin and Gurses the existence of a void between the modern challenges of the State and the content of Turkish public administration programmes that mainly focused on traditional constructs like structure, organization, and legal framework of the country, rather than the contemporary challenges faced by the modern state. However, they note small but encouraging signs of renewal in curricula among academics who are keen to expand the curricula to include topics like civil society, e-government, and governance. Drawing on the work of several influential scholars, Karkin and Gurses, go on to argue that a novel and innovative curriculum is an essential condition for further development and reform of the Turkish State.

Finally, like Karkin and Gurses, my contribution to the special issue also examines how well public administration programmes prepare their graduates for a changing public sector. My interest was to determine whether the curriculum of MPA and MPP programmes accredited by the Canadian Association of Programmes in Public Administration (CAPPA) were aligned with the skills required by the public sector. My study was based on an exhaustive review of 29 CAPPA accredited MPA programmes, supplemented with key informant interviews. My overarching finding is that the curriculum of MPA/MPP programmes are not aligned with the requirements of civil services. This leads me to suggerst that civil services and academic public administration need to engage with each other to ensure that future civil servants possess the skills relevant at a time of significant change in the nature of work.

In closing, a note about the people who made this special issue a reality. In addition to the contributing authors, this special issue is the result of a collective effort that began several months ago with Prudence Brown (University of Queensland) and Hiroko Kudo (Chuo University), without whom this special issue would not have been possible. Both were key contributors to the IRSPM panel on education and training where thinking about issues of curriculum began. I would also like to acknowledge TPA’s co-editors, John Diamond and Catherine Farrell who welcomed the proposal for this special issue and worked with me to bring it forth.

If this special issue has increased your appreciation of the importance of curriculum as the cornerstone of teaching and learning in public administration, then we have achieved our goal. I hope you enjoy this special issue.