Teaching Public Administration

Teaching public policy, social policy, public management and public administration is an important vocation. It has the capacity to help equip the next generation of public and civil servants for the multitude of complex and challenging tasks they must undertake. Teaching public policy builds capacity within the public service, and can also be useful in training and preparing those who work alongside government, providing voluntary or contracted services.

This article provides a case study of tutor’s reflection on practice leading to a different approach to teaching an introductory course on politics and policy at a major Australian university, aimed at better reaching disengaged students. The overhaul led to higher levels of constructive student engagement in the tutorials, resulting in improved student and learning outcomes. Tutors, with their broad face-to-face and individual contact, have the means to assess student engagement and understanding in ways not always available to lecturers. As such, they can support holistic curriculum development if they are seen as relevant stakeholders in this process. The article demonstrates the value of seeing tutorials and tutors as an integral consideration in curriculum development.

This paper draws on nine years of undergraduate student course evaluation surveys to explore learning and teaching practices in an introductory public policy course in Australia. The paper situates student responses in terms of an increasingly complex teaching and learning environment. The student cohort includes a diverse group of arts, law, business and technology-based undergraduates. The paper explores both quantitative and qualitative survey data in order to draw out students’ perceptions and views on teaching, learning and their engagement with public policy. The paper considers some of the ways students grapple with increasing levels of complexity, their perceptions of interactive and participatory teaching strategies as tools for learning, and their views around enhancing university learning. The paper provides a set of reflections that may enhance student experiences in increasingly complex environments.

Public policy is frequently characterised as a sub-discipline of political science which is practically oriented and concerned with what government does and does not do. Further, policy analysis can also be characterised as concerned with either the analysis ‘of policy’ or ‘for policy’. This clearly has implications for the design and delivery of public policy courses. More broadly, higher education in Australia, like elsewhere, faces calls to ensure that students graduate with a range of skills and aptitudes that make them ‘job ready’ and able to engage with ‘real world problems’. One of the ways in which this can be pursued is through industry engagement. However, limited research has been undertaken regarding what this might entail or how it can be pursued. Accordingly, in this paper we explore these issues by: (a) situating engagement within the field of public policy; (b) reviewing how the changing context of higher education, with a particular focus on the drivers and rationale for greater engagement with industry, intersects with the teaching of public policy; and (c) providing a framework which helps to clarify the different modes, potential and risks associated with industry engagement.

Academic integrity matters are relevant to all areas of university teaching, but they are of particular importance to degree programmes whose graduates intend to work in the public service. While a large body of scholarship exists on academic integrity, very little has been written that specifically relates to students who intend to pursue careers in the public sector. This article is a reflection of the author’s experience as Academic Integrity Officer in the School of Social and Policy Studies at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, between January 2016 and July 2017, during which time 92 cases of suspected breaches of academic integrity were reviewed and adjudicated. An analysis of the cases presented here suggests that universities can make more use of preventative strategies than they currently do, and that more emphasis should be placed on prevention and less on punishment as a response.

Australia’s state-based public sector standing anti-corruption commissions each have an education function. The function is underpinned by a largely unquestioned assumption that integrity education will reduce levels of misconduct and corruption in the public sector. This study explores how these commissions undertake evaluations and publicly report on the effectiveness of their education events to demonstrate a contribution to this purpose. It acknowledges that well-designed and executed education events may deliver public value outcomes, but finds that the evaluative and reporting approaches used by commissions are insufficient to reliably demonstrate whether or not the function actually achieves this purpose. The dominance of exposure-as-success attendance statistics revealed in this study is particularly concerning as they offer no insights that are directly relevant to this purpose. Consistent with the findings of previous studies, there is also a heavy reliance on reaction-based satisfaction surveys that primarily reflect participants’ enjoyment of an education event, but do not provide meaningful evidence of learning, application of learning, organizational impact, or the overall delivery of public value. As such, it is argued that commissions need to transition from largely superficial appraisals to more robust and strategic assessments that measure actual attitudinal and behavioral change in the public sector. This study also raises questions of broader relevance to the evaluation of other types of workplace education, particularly that requiring affective and behavioral learning.