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Creating a syllabus for a new course: The answer-seeking method

A few months ago, University Affairs (the premiere higher education magazine in Canada) asked me if I would be willing to write something for them. I wrote about how I use storytelling techniques to create a syllabus. The syllabus-writing-as-storytelling (SWAS) method works very well when you know EXACTLY the kind of course you will be teaching. Using the SWAS method would be very simple if I were teaching any of the public policy courses I used to teach at UBC, or any of the environmental politics, global environmental politics or Latin American environmental politics courses I taught there too.

Syllabusing (syllabus building)

But that didn’t happen in 2013.

When I was asked to start teaching again (I got a one-year release from teaching when I arrived to CIDE), I was tasked with two courses: First, State and Local Government (2013-2014) and Regional Development (2014-2015). My first thought was “oh, great… I now have to create two new courses and I have no clue what I want to teach”. Bear in mind, I study subnational politics and governance, but I had never needed to teach Federalism or Subnational Politics, let alone a course in State and Local Government. Same with Regional Development. I do economic geography, spatial analysis and public policy, but I had never combined them in a course. These courses are what I call “area courses” (e.g. not specific to public policy, or political science per se).

So what did I do? I started asking myself questions. That’s why I call this method “answer-seeking”. The first thing I wanted to know was “what exactly should I be teaching in a State and Local Government course?”. I figured the best technique I could use was attempting to answer these questions. Below you will find a sample of the kind of questions I asked myself to create this course:

  • What exactly does subnational politics entail?
  • What types of governments do we have?
  • What types of relationships do these governments have with each other?
  • How are the types of governments (and the levels of governments) relating to each other?
  • How do the different branches of government (executive, legislative, judiciary) relate to each other and at which different levels (state, municipal, federal)?
  • How do governments at the municipal level deal with governance issues that cross different scales?
  • What kinds of new developments in state and local government scholarship are coming along?
  • What kind of political science and public policy scholarship applies specifically to subnational levels?
  • Which journals publish stuff at the subnational level?

What I did next was to start researching the answers to my own self-posed questions. In doing so, I started crafting a trajectory of what the course would be looking like:

  1. Governments and governance
  2. The executive at all three levels
  3. The legislative at all three levels
  4. The judiciary at all three levels
  5. Vertical and horizontal interactions across government levels and branches
  6. Subnational politics and policy (and different areas of policy)
  7. Metropolitan governance, intermunicipal cooperation
  8. Cooperation across sectors: industry, academia, non-profit sector relations with the government at all three levels
  9. Polycentric governance
  10. New developments in state and local government

Having a relatively large followership on Twitter and belonging to the Political Scientists Facebook group helped me too, because I could ask questions to my followers on specific topics, and authors. Furthermore, since I adjust my courses’ syllabi for gender and under-represented minorities’ scholarship, I had to revisit the topics to ensure that I had opened spaces and opportunities for URMS. You can check the outcome of this exercise, in the most recent version (2015) of my State and Local Government syllabus.

As time has gone by, and the more I have taught the course, I have learned more about which topics are relevant and how my students react to specific assigned reading materials and activities. Therefore, for the next iterations, I don’t seek to answer questions, but I instead use more of a storytelling approach, which you can read about here.

Hopefully my method can be useful to those of you facing new preps!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 9, 2016

Should public administration scholarship be subjected to the same transparency standards as political science? A response to Lars Tummers

This is an expanded response to Dr. Lars Tummers’ essay on transparency in Public Administration Review’s Speak Your Mind section. The original is located here. I also blogged about qualitative vs quantitative standards a few weeks back but I had not published that essay, which is live now and can be read here.

Professor Lars Tummers wrote an excellent essay for Public Administration Review‘s blog Speak Your Mind that raises fundamental issues with which I am very familiar with, as I’ve taken part of the discussions in the political science realm, from a qualitative researcher perspective. Many of the responses to Lars’ essay have addressed these points at much longer length than I could possibly do, and I can’t make justice to the debate in a few short lines, so I’m just going to raise a few points from a very personal perspective.

1) I am wholeheartedly in favor of more open science, replications, transparency, pre-registration and a number of elements of a more robust, causal-mechanism-driven social science. I work with experimental methods (I was originally trained as a chemical engineer, so I did experiments before experiments were cool in social sciences) and therefore I espouse many of the views of several posters here, including Professor Tummers.

2) I am trained as a political scientist who works in a public administration department. As a result, I have read (and written about) the debates (which were actually happening in political science well before public administration caught up to them). This debate hasn’t ended and is still heated. The LaCour and Green and Alice Goffman issues have only contributed to elevating the level of discussion and the need for an open conversation about this.

3) I do, however, conduct qualitative (primarily interview-based, ethnographic and discourse analysis) research. I don’t want to enter into a discussion about whether the epistemology and ontology of social sciences should be divided in qualitative and quantitative methods. This debate is never going to end, so I strongly recommend reading Tom Pepinsky and Jay Ulfelder on why the discussion on qual/quant divides may actually be detrimental rather than useful.

4) Based on the fact that I conduct ethnographic work in very vulnerable communities, I am rather wary of sharing raw data (e.g. my field notes) with anybody to leave them for interpretation. Identification of vulnerable populations in any kind of social science reporting is not well seen, and many would see it as actually harmful. The IRB principles are there for a reason. We need to protect those communities we study and avoid any kind of harm to them.

5) Let’s not forget the fact that I’m a pre-tenure, tenure-track professor (a factor that plays into me being disincentivized to share raw data – what if someone who writes/analyzes data faster than me comes up with a faster analysis than I can possibly produce? My tenure committee isn’t going to judge me for data production, they’ll judge me for publications in high impact journals).

6) Even when I do quantitative analysis, I very often create my own datasets and therefore I am wary of sharing them before I have exploited them (see point 5). Transparency is rad, and I’m all for letting people judge the quality and rigor of my work by examining my databases and how I processed them (e.g. publishing code, etc.) BUT I am not ok with someone publishing a paper with my database BEFORE I get a chance to do so. Again, we are not rewarding data production, we are rewarding journal article/book publication.

7) What I think is missing from the conversation is a series of tables (sorry, I think in diagrams and tables) creating possible scenarios and then describing EXACTLY what the TOP guidelines would require from a researcher to comply with them. For example – my next paper is on the politics of water privatization in Mexico. Do I need to publish the raw data? Do I need to submit the raw transcripts of my interviews? Should I post them anonymized (anonymity will reduce the ability of researchers who might want to replicate my study to learn more of the contextual elements of my analysis)? I think that’s what is missing. A simple, visual, easy guide with several scenarios, containing MANY examples from the qualitative and interpretive traditions.

In summary, do I think public administration scholarship could use more transparency? For sure. We need to be able to test whether claims in PA journals actually can be sustained by the evidence presented and by the data collected. But PA suffers from the same emerging chasm between quantitative and qualitative research. I don’t want PA to fetichisize quantitative analysis as more rigorous. There is plenty of qualitative, interpretive, ethnographic research that is robust and analytical. I want a more rigorous PA scholarship and stronger, robust, testable research designs. That’s what I want, and that’s what I hope we can all contribute.

(and yes, I just saw the 2016 IPMJ summary article on ethnography in public management research, BTW). I also participated in the session at PMRC where the analysis presented by Ospina, Esteve and their PhD student showed, and I quote Esteve from Twitter “7.5% qual studies in top PA journ. last 5 years. Presenting it at PMRC & S. Ospina :)”

Thanks Andy Whitford, Steve Kelman, Lars Tummers and Don Moynihan also for excellent discussions on Twitter on this topic. I leave you with one of the discussions I enjoyed the most about this topic in the tweets below:

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 1, 2016

Should qualitative data be subjected to the same transparency standards as quantitative?

If you’ve followed me on Twitter for any length of time, you’ll know I’m someone who is very much into open access, open science, transparency, replicability and traceability. I strongly believe that we should make our research as open and transparent as possible so that people can replicate our findings (or fail to replicate, as the case may be). In fact, if you read my tweets from when the DART initiative started, I was actually pretty supportive.

Today, I am not so sure anymore. I started feeling quite uneasy and I can’t quite put my finger on the reason why. Since I use my writing to reflect on issues, I decided to write a blog post.

Transparency is an issue that is important to me, but one that I don’t spend my every living moment thinking about. So, bear that in mind when you critique/read my post. These are some reflections that may be preliminary, and that may or not be correct. I don’t have the time nor the inclination to spend much time on this reflection at this point in my life. When I submit a paper to a journal whose standards for replication require me to be completely transparent about my data, I’ll have to reflect on it a lot more. Right now, I have papers to finish, so this reflection is necessarily incomplete.

The issue that prompted my reflection and uneasiness was the following: I read a paper authored by a specific researcher, we’ll call him A. This researcher used the primary data generated by another researcher, we will call her B (who seemed quite knowledgeable about the topic). Despite the fact that the fieldwork seemed quite short, I gave B the benefit of the doubt as she had published quite extensively about the topic. But A hadn’t. A’s foray into the topic seemed basically grabbing B’s data, thinking about it through a different theoretical lens, and voila, you have a peer reviewed paper. A cited B, and mentioned he had used her data.

Organizing my fieldwork notebook

When I finished reading the article, I felt really uneasy. This action (A publishing a paper using B’s fieldwork data) seemed unethical to me. I don’t know why, I can’t shake the feeling, and it may actually not be the case. But that’s how I felt. I shared my thoughts on Twitter. Now, if you know me, you’ll know that I’m more than happy to share my quantitative datasets, my papers, even my conference (draft) papers. Heck, I was even willing to share raw field notes. But this particular paper stopped me on my tracks.

The question, obviously, lingers… shouldn’t qualitative data be subjected to the same standards as quantitative? Why am I so willing to share my datasets so openly but my fieldwork (qualitative) data (interviews, participant observations) I don’t feel as excited to share as before? I don’t know, and I’m not sure if it’s the fact that I’m pre-tenure and I worry about being scooped (seeing as I’ve seen 5 papers published that were exactly the pieces I was going to write, this feeling has increased in the past few months).

WARNING – my commenting system is somehow not working as well as I would like it to, so if you have a long comment to write, I suggest you type it in Word or LaTeX and save it, and if you can’t insert it into my comments box section, email it to me, and I’ll post it directly on the WordPress interface.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 1, 2016

The 30 minute challenge: Achieving short-term goals

For the 30 minutes challengeA few weeks ago, I wrote about a strategy I use to keep myself motivated: the Quick Wins method. I use this method because I am actually someone who faces enormous challenges in keeping himself focused and motivated. Because I have so many different research interests and I study a relatively broad range of issues, it’s hard for me to stay on track and focus on just ONE project or task at a time. I have been practising this habit, but I’m definitely not there yet. However, every time I resort back to the Quick Wins strategy, I realise that every one of us has a different definition of what a Quick Win is. Recently, Dr. Amber Wutich mentioned that writing a memorandum counts as a quick win. Amber is right. When I’m really fresh and just woke up, I can crank out a full journal article or book chapter memorandum within 30 minutes. This degree of effectiveness and efficiency changes throughout the day, and because my body is relatively fragile, I need to make the most of the 30 minute blocks I have available for important tasks.

So I set out to test how many different tasks I can do with 30 minutes. This challenge isn’t new. Several academics have written before me about the need to remain focused and stay on track, and to use as much of the time you have to move your work forward. I myself have recently (in the past two years) been championing a strategy whereby you move every project you have forward a little bit every day but then zero in and finish it off.

Many people claim that they don’t have enough hours in the day to fit writing into their day. I don’t have that excuse, since I wake up at 4 am every single morning to write. I write even if it is only my handwritten notes from the margins of articles, books or books chapters I’ve been reading. Even if it’s only a memo, or only scribbles on the papers’ margins, I write every morning (even if it’s a summary of a paper, or a reflective memo). When I can’t write for 2 hours straight, I try to get 4 thirty-minutes’ blocks of writing.

Writing a memorandum

The first time I read that 30 minutes were enough to achieve academic goals was when I read Dr. Aimee Morrison’s blog on Hook & Eye on the 30 minute miracle. Dr. Jo VanEvery, a well-respected academic coach and a good friend of mine has recommended to her clients (and blog readers) to engage in the 15 minute challenge. Jo suggests that you need to find 15 minutes in your day to write. I agree that there is A LOT that can be done within those 15 minutes.

I am pretty sure I know exactly how much work I can get done in 15 minutes, but I wasn’t 100% sure about how much stuff I could accomplish in 30 minute increments other than free-writing and editing pieces of manuscripts. I have tested writing for 30 minutes for a very, very long time and I know that I can write between 100 and 300 words in those 30 minutes. I know I can highlight and scribble half an article in 30 minutes. But I wanted to see if other tasks could fit the 30 minute challenge posed by Aimeé. This is a brief report of my experience. Bear in mind: I chose time blocks at different points during the day. It became very clear to me that my efficiency and the number of things I can accomplish in 30 minutes first thing in the morning is super high, and it’s slowly but surely reduced throughout the day. I wrote most of this blog post in less than 30 minutes!

So here are the results of my 30 minutes challenge (I undertook this challenge on Friday July 29th, which was still part of my actual holidays).

  • I read, highlighted and scribbled one article (well, really 50% of it) within the first 30 minutes.
  • Then I finished processing the manuscript and started typing the memo associated with it. I wrote 1345 words of a memo, and I haven’t even finished the first part of the memo.
  • Then I realized I was already in a groove and spent the next 30 minutes writing more of the memorandum. I also typed my handwritten scribbles on the margins.
  • Then I wrote this blog post, searched for images to embed, searched for Jo’s and Aimeé’s blog so that I could link back to them and attribute, then I found my own blog posts on organization and memo writing.

Basically I did 4 blocks of 30 minutes of work, and I haven’t even finished processing an article and writing a memorandum. I think I need another 30 minutes of work to finish processing this article, because I got so angry reading it that I have A LOT of scribbles that need to be typed and transcribed. But as I was doing the 30 minute challenge, I realized that Aimeé is completely right: you can move your work forward A LOT 30 minutes at a time.

Thanks for reminding me of this, Dr. Morrison!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 29, 2016

Writing effective memorandums

One of the challenges I face when teaching my students how to write effective memos (memoranda, memorandums) is that I have developed my own method of memo-writing after reading dozens of books, book chapters, articles, and implementing some of those ideas. I’ve written so many memos that I don’t actually know whether to recommend a specific text as a guideline.

There are many benefits to learning how to write effective memos. Memo-writing allows you to really engage with the material (beyond highlighting and taking notes on the margins of your printed copies, or digital ones in PDF). Writing memoranda also allows you to integrate reading into your writing workflow. Stuck in the morning during your alloted writing time? You can read an article and write a memorandum about it = problem solved. You can write memos about your readings, about your fieldwork, about your data (laboratory or field or computer-generated). The key element is that whatever kind of memo you write, it should be useful to you.

For those who think I only do analog stuff: I also do handwritten memos. Writing a memo can also be used as a Quick Win, and the results from the memos can be dumped into the Excel synthetic lit review worksheet.

notes

I recently re-read a chapter of Corbin and Straus’ classic “Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory” on memo-writing and diagrams (Chapter 6). Corbin and Strauss’ book is one of my favorites, I read it during my PhD studies) and I have always recommended it because I think that it might be useful for students, particularly those who use qualitative methods. Re-reading the chapter really sparked my interest in writing an example and sharing how I actually do my memo-writing (even though I’m still on holidays!).

From the excerpt below you can notice that I start writing my memo with the full citation at the top, as shown in my Mendeley database. Then I usually write a contextual summary that interweaves the book or journal article or book chapter I’m memo-ing with my own research or thoughts about other authors and/or specific citations.

Bjorkman memo

I then start extracting specific quotations I might want to use. One tip that I think should be useful for others is that I extract the quotation in Word EXACTLY as I would need it and insert it in an actual manuscript. That is, I link the actual citation with the Mendeley Cite-As-You-Write plug in, and do a manual edit so I can literally copy and paste. That way, the Mendeley fields will be inserted into the manuscript I’m writing, and I don’t need to manually search my Mendeley database when I write the paper.

I usually interweave quotations with text related to other authors, as though I were writing an actual manuscript. Doing this for a memo means that I can extract full paragraphs of several memoranda and assemble the literature review. I also use this technique to extract quotations that I can then dump into my Excel literature review synthesis.

Something else I do when I write a memo is that I search my Mendeley database for a specific phrase or word, or author, to see who else should I be linking to within a specific memorandum. For example, I always thought the work of Lisa Björkman could be linked to that of Malini Ranganathan, Georgina Drew, Colin McFarlane, Matthew Gandy. When I search my Mendeley database, I find several of these authors already mentioned. So, I can then draw a conceptual map of authors that links their work and I now know who else is writing about urban water infrastructure, informality and governance in Mumbai, India.

Mumbai Mendeley search

Shown in the extract below, I have written notes to myself in this memo about specific authors that I think should be engaged when writing about the work of Lisa Björkman, and how this links to my own work on informal water markets in Mexico. Since most of the time I am writing memos from memory, it is actually very useful to have my Excel dump worksheet open, as well as my Mendeley database. That way I can copy and paste quotations directly without having to worry about repeating the procedure once I have finished writing the memorandum.

citations memo and engagement

I’m quite honest in the notes I write in my memoranda, so I am often wary of sharing an actual memo of mine, but I thought that even though this memo is in progress, it might be useful for other academics (and even my own students) to see how I try to write effective memorandums. I strongly recommend this technique to engage the material in greater depth. You can then upload the Word memorandum into Evernote and tag it with specific keywords, or just simply keep it stored in your Dropbox.

Hopefully sharing my memo-writing method will be useful for students, practitioners and fellow professors/instructors/educators/academic writers!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 28, 2016

KonMari your campus desk and office: The benefits of decluttering your academic life

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I often post photographs of what I’m doing, reading, and (often times) eating. Yesterday, I posted photos of how I had cleaned up my campus office (I’m officially on holidays, although I had to come into the office for 3 days in a row to help one of my PhD students with some paperwork). Most people think I’m crazy for always doing this much cleaning and keeping my office so organised. But I have to do it in order to feel at peace before I head out for my actual, real holidays.

Everyone thinks I’m crazy, except those who understand why my brain can’t work in a cluttered environment.

I’ve been an organisation freak since I was a child. I was used to writing notes with different colour pens, always kept a daily log of my homework, tasks to do, achievements. For those who don’t know, I’m a Virgo. We tend to be obsessive about organisation and analytical at every point in our lives. I took that organisation-freak personality through graduate school and now as a professor. I ardently protect my writing and concentration work time, I am someone who loves keeping track of his students’ work and will do so almost obsessively, and I always look for ways to make my work and personal lives easier.

I’m far from the first person to write about decluttering in academia (in fact, I wrote the title of this post in homage to Dr. Punita C. Rice, whose post “KonMari your writing” is excellent), but the benefits, to me, are many, so I felt I had to write about them.

As Punita indicates, the KonMari method (proposed by Marie Kondo, a Japanese decluttering consultant and writer of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying: A Simple, Effective Way to Banish Clutter Forever) focuses on keeping only whatever brings you joy. Again, I just found out this year about Marie Kondo from Dr. Aimeé Morrison (University of Waterloo), and have always been a “clean up your room every single day” kind of guy, but I find the KonMari method to make absolute sense for what I do as an academic. Like Marie Kondo preaches, I only keep whatever gives me joy. I’ve gotten rid of magazine holders who aren’t the brand I like, highlighters I tested and didn’t really work for me. Everything that stays in my office DOES bring me joy. For example, on a shelf, I keep physical miniatures of toilets and water wells and water fountains (since water and wastewater is what I study).

My campus office at CIDE

At my office, I have two huge whiteboards and a large corkboard. I write on one of my whiteboards all my collaborations and tasks that I need to work on. This keeps me accountable to my colleagues with whom I’m doing collaborative research projects.

My campus office, cleaned up

On the other whiteboard, I keep a daily log of my tasks (these come from my Everything Notebook). Every Friday I write down what I couldn’t accomplish in the week into my Everything Notebook and then I use that as a basis to create the list of To-Do tasks for the following week.

My campus office, cleaned up

On my corkboard, I keep copies of printed stuff that I need for quick access, including motivational material, and photographs of my nieces and nephews, as well as my Mom. My corkboard has basically everything that I need to see on an everyday basis: our fall schedule, writing motivation, my family and loved ones, motivational quotes on being organised and productive, tips for accomplishing tasks, calls for papers or conferences I need to think about, my own conceptual outlines for projects.

My campus office, cleaned up

On my left-hand side desk, right by my desktop computer (which is in Spanish, the language in which I have to operate 50% of the time) I keep a book rest to allow me to read materials, and a series of trays for “stuff I need to process“, “stuff I already processed and needs to be filed away“, and “articles I should read at some point“.

My campus office, cleaned up

And I have lots, and lots of coloured pens, fine-lined markers, highlighters, adhesive notes (Post-It). I keep all of the stuff that I need to read, write, type, at my fingertips. Knowing where everything goes allows me to waste basically zero time in finding it.

highlighting

My books are organised on shelves by the topic (urban governance, regional development, public policy, environmental policy, climate change, water, non-state actors, international relations). My journal articles and book chapters are organised in magazine holders, with a plastic tab with the citation and year for ease of access. Each magazine holder has associated a specific research project I’m doing, or a topic I’m interested in.

My campus office, cleaned up

Every few days, and at least once before the semester starts, I do a thorough purge and clean up. I store files from old projects, and previous semesters, I clean my desk, plan whatever is coming up for the fall, clean my weekly/daily activity whiteboard and reorganise my office supplies. Obviously my desk gets messy the more stuff I start doing. Particularly when I engage in reading sprees, I often have piles, and piles of journal articles and book chapters all printed and ready to be highlighted and written on, and engaged on.

Writing a memorandum

But then, once I’m done, I again organise them into their own magazine holders. My digital files suffer the same destiny – once a week I declutter my Dropbox and check my Mendeley for references that have not been cleaned. Having a clean desk allows me to focus on finishing projects and zero in on the specific target or task at hand.

One thing that really resonated with me from the Marie Kondo Tidying Up method is that you get to only keep what brings you joy. One reason why I love coming into my campus office every single day is that it actually brings me joy. I LOVE my office on campus. I’ve decorated it and organised it the way I like it and thus it really gives me immense joy to come into work. I guess if I had a smaller space, or an open plan space that I couldn’t decorate the way I like, I wouldn’t be as happy. But even my home office (which is WAY smaller than my campus office) is organised the same way, and it also brings me enormous joy. I think it’s because it’s really well organised.

Clean slates work for me. I prefer to work in an organised, clean and comfortable environment, and I apply that to the way in which I live and work.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 22, 2016

Keeping yourself motivated: The Quick Wins method

One of the issues I struggle with the most is motivation. I am organized, I keep all my plans, schedules, notes, fieldwork scribbles in my Everything Notebook, but sometimes I feel like I have so much to do I just get overwhelmed. While I have learned to break down my workload by the month, week, day, schedule time with buffers, and to focus solely on one task when I’m trying to finish a paper, I still sometimes feel like it’s 2pm and I still have nothing to show for it.

I have been having really good conversations on Twitter and Facebook with several fellow academics (my good friend from graduate school, Professor Amanda Bittner being one of those key ones) where we discuss our planning, workflow processes, etc. Below is Amanda’s notebook (very similar to my Everything Notebook). Like Amanda, I divide my day in different task types (“Writing”, “Administrative”, “Students”, “Research”, “Data”).

For all my geekiness, I write my To Do list by hand /)But I have a very special section: The Quick Wins section. These are small tasks that if I just focus for 15, 30, or 45 minutes I can get them done, and THEN they will make me feel like I have accomplished SOMETHING. My Quick Wins method looks very similar to what Dr. Katherine Firth recommends in this blog post “To Do Lists That Actually Work“. My “Quick Wins” section is Dr. Firth’s “Done List”. When I plan my Quick Wins, I know for a fact that I will actually have the time to finish them. For example, if I have a meeting at 12 noon, and I’m at the office at 10:45am, I am 100% sure I won’t have the time to write for 2 hours straight. Usually my research assistants and administrative assistants meet with me as soon as I get into the office, so that means I am unable to do anything of significance.

If this happens too frequently, I get frustrated and then I get into a spiral of self-doubt. My brain starts to think: “I write about academic productivity, and it’s 1:30pm and I have NOTHING to show for it“. To keep myself motivated, I need to make sure that I can actually accomplish stuff. So, I create a list of “Quick Wins”.

I call them “quick wins” because they are usually things I can finish in a very short period of time, they are actually meaningful.

To-Do list handwritten

Some examples of Quick Wins:

  • Read a dissertation chapter of one of my PhD students.
  • Write feedback for my Masters’ students on their thesis.
  • Draft a memorandum from a journal article I’ve already read and highlighted.
  • Type my notes from a research meeting, or from a memorandum I wrote by hand.
  • Dump the memorandum in my Excel dump spreadsheet for that particular topic.
  • Insert 5 books or 10 journal articles into my Mendeley database, and clean the entries.
  • Draft the first version of an abstract for a conference paper).

The idea of a “Done List” isn’t new, but its application in academia still seems like quite recent still. It wasn’t until I read Katherine’s post that I realized her method was similar to mine. It’s a neat mental trick.

AND IT WORKS.

The Quick Wins method is especially suited to be tested using the 30 Minutes Miracle method that Dr. Aimee Morrison offered in Hook and Eye. I set my Quick Wins to blocks of 15, 30 or 45 minutes at the very most because if I have a full hour, then it will definitely go to writing (or any other deep-concentration stuff that I need to do like data analysis).

One fundamental element of the Quick Wins method is that your quick wins need to be

  • (a) actually accomplishable within the time frame you set (15, 30, 45 minutes).
  • (b) things you can quickly take up again if somebody interrupts you in the middle of finishing one.
  • (c) stuff that you don’t need deep concentration for. If you need more than 1 hour, it’s not a Quick Win.

I am currently in the process of testing how many different types of Quick Wins I can do in blocks of 30 minutes, following Dr. Morrison’s suggestion. I’ll let you know how that goes!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 16, 2016

Policy analysis as a clinical profession

Thinking like a policy analystI just finished reading Dr. Iris Geva-May‘s 2005 edited book “Thinking Like a Policy Analyst. Policy Analysis as a Clinical Profession“. I have always respected the work of Dr. Geva-May, as she is someone I know from my PhD days through Dr. Michael Howlett (perhaps the most prolific and influential scholar of public policy worldwide). Mike is a good friend of mine and has been my mentor since when I started my PhD program at UBC, and we remain close to this day. Dr. Geva-May and Dr. Howlett have been extraordinarily influential in the field of comparative policy analysis (they co-edited the Handbook of Comparative Policy Analysis, one of my favorite reads). Iris is the founding editor of the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis (JCPA, one of the top ranked journals in the field), and Mike is one of the managing editors.

Since comparative public policy is exactly what I do, I am a big fan of Mike and Iris’ work. Thusly, it’s no wonder I always refer to their scholarship in my teaching and research. I began reading “Thinking Like a Policy Analyst” because I am back again teaching public policy theory and practice courses and I wanted to see what was out there that I could use for readings and to improve my teaching. Last semester I taught Public Policy Analysis for the first time at CIDE (I had already taught this course and variants of the same at UBC) and I’m teaching it again this fall. Like I did when I was at UBC, I tried to make my course as pragmatic and practical as possible.

This is because I am interested in teaching my students how to do actual policy analysis instead of just making them write research papers. In my courses (all of them, from those I taught at UBC to those I teach now at CIDE) I have always asked my students to do practical stuff, and the writing output that comes out of these projects are also varied: a 24 hour policy analysis, a case study, policy memoranda, briefing cards, etc. I teach my students how to write policy content.

I’ve been pondering a lot about what skills do we need to teach since we started the Bachelor of Public Policy program at our campus of CIDE (Region Centro), but this reflection began when I was still a faculty member at The University of British Columbia, in their Department of Political Science. I’ve always been keen to teach my students skills that will get them hired. Job markets worry me not so much for me, but for my own students. Every semester that I see a new cohort of students graduate, my inner dialogue always starts with a bit of self-doubt: “Did I do enough to prepare these students to learn? Did I teach them enough skills that they can now go out into the world and sell them to local governments, activists, lobbyists and think tanks?“. I think it IS my duty to teach my students stuff that they will use in their careers or that they can use to advance their own work trajectories.

My good friend Dr. Debora VanNijnatten (Wilfrid Laurier University) recently visited CIDE to give a seminar and do a short research stay, and she also shared a few ideas on practical applications and exercises that we could do at CIDE with our Public Policy undergraduate students, many of which I had already implemented with my UBC students, but I am now keen to do with my CIDE cohorts. That’s where Dr. Geva-May’s book comes handy. This is an edited volume to which many of the brightest minds in policy analysis contributed. It’s an edited volume where the contributors share their ideas about specific teaching methods, writing outputs and analytical exercises. As such, this is not a book to assign to your students, but to your faculty who teach policy analysis.

The main thrust of the book is that you should teach policy analysis as a clinical profession, where you behave like those in the medical field would: you diagnose an illness (a policy problem, in this case), and you find solutions to said problem (policy options). Much like workers in the medical field (and this is one of the key ideas of the book and one I take to heart), policy analysts must make decisions under uncertainty. They have to design policy options under time pressure, faced with resource constraints and political attacks from multiple angles. Geva-May and her book contributors make a very strong case for teaching our students to treat policy analysis like a clinician would do.

I have to admit that I love teaching with case studies (remember, I have an MBA, so I am used to the Harvard-style case study), although in “Thinking Like a Policy Analyst”, Eugene Smolensky makes a convincing case for why he doesn’t teach with case studies (although I side with Leslie Pal who argues that the case study method is a very good technique to teach policy analysis. Weimer and Vining side with Pal in that they see the value of creating the P Case Study (i.e. the policy analysis case study). This is not exactly the same type of case study that you would see in Harvard-style, business school Masters of Business Administration training, but it would focus on specific clinical responses to policy problems. Again, the whole philosophy of seeing policy analysis as a clinical exercise shines through the Weimer and Vining and Pal chapters.

While the entire book is valuable, I found a lot of really interesting insights in several specific chapters. I ran simulations when I taught Environmental Politics and Policy, and I did the same when I taught Global Environmental Politics. So, I was very drawn to Luger’s chapter on supplementing case studies with policy simulations. This semester, I plan to run a simulation of a decision-making process for a municipality, since I have the most friends in local governments (though I also have friends in the Mexican federal cabinet).

Another key and insightful exercise that Debora recommended that I also believe is key for everyone doing policy analysis at the undergraduate, graduate and PhD level is the capstone project, as proposed by Peter DeLeon and Spiros Protopsalis. DeLeon and Protopsalis suggest that students (in their case, Masters’ level students) should tackle real policy problems and use their capstone project beyond a simple graduation requirement and more as an exercise in real-life policy analysis. Dennis Smith outlines the experience of one of the best schools in public affairs, public administration and policy analysis, the New York University Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, also known as the NYU/Wagner School.

While the book is mostly on pedagogy, Beryl Radin’s chapter on the creation of the U.S. Department of Education and how you can analyze policy goals through the policy process, and Peter May’s chapter on policy maps and political feasibility are good chapters to assign to your students if you want to simultaneously teach the techniques and have them see through the technique to understand the underlying pedagogy. I will give these chapters a second read, because I might actually assign them in my Public Policy Analysis course.

I already had a pretty solid syllabus for Public Policy Analysis, but reading Iris Geva-May and her collaborators has made me rethink what I want to teach in the class and the pedagogical techniques that I was planning to use. “Thinking Like a Policy Analyst” made me feel particularly drawn to experimentation with several techniques I had used before but I had left behind when I started teaching at CIDE. This happened because I wasn’t teaching public policy courses per se, but more area studies (e.g. Regional Development, and State & Local Government). But now that I am back teaching core public policy courses, I am also back to thinking more deeply about these issues, and I’m grateful to Dr. Iris Geva-May for assembling “Thinking Like a Policy Analyst”. It really will be very helpful not only for my own teaching but as we discuss the future of the Bachelor of Public Policy Program at CIDE, and even the Masters in Public Policy and Management and the Doctor of Philosophy in Public Policy programmes.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 14, 2016

In defense of the research manager and administrative assistant positions in academia

I just ran a workshop at CIDE on the governance of e-waste in Mexico and the US. This workshop is a component of a project that was funded by a Collaborative Grant of the University of California UCMEXUS/CONACYT programme. The intellectual input was provided by my co-principal investigator, Kate O’Neill from University of California Berkeley, and myself. But all the logistics were undertaken by my administrative assistant (Nora Salazar) and my research assistant (Luis Alberto Hernandez). EVERYTHING. I mean, ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING. Nora and Luis kept a vigilant eye on the budget, made sure to submit invoice requests, communicated with our financial services offices, communicated with each one of the workshop participants, ensured we had a budget and menus for lunch, dinner and the closing toast. It’s the work of the administrative assistants and research manager what makes these events look so easy to run.

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Nora chased contractors, vendors, supervised that the workshop took place flawlessly, booked spaces, coordinated with Luis to print out all the workshop materials, ensured that everything worked properly. Luis and Nora were able to lift all the administrative weight off of my shoulders. I wouldn’t be able to run a workshop or even hire people to provide services if I didn’t have an administrative assistant and a research manager. Two years ago, the main administrative coordinator for the Public Administration Division at CIDE in our Santa Fe campus, Wendy Veana, did all the logistical work for a workshop I ran on Mexican water governance. Again, I didn’t even need to *think* about the logistics of the workshop, all I had to do was provide a list of guests, and as Wendy told me, “Professor, all you need to do is tell me who to invite and I’ll run the workshop. You do the intellectual work, I do the logistics and administrative work.“. For my INECC project on climate policy evaluation I relied on Fabiola Mora, our superb administrative assistant at CIDE (the Region Centro campus). I simply can’t execute a funded project without administrative assistants and research managers.

Lunch Seminario Gobernanza del Agua

The problem I’ve seen in many granting agencies is that they don’t fund the research manager position. They also don’t provide support for ongoing administrative work. I am not 100% sure what the assumption is. I wonder if they believe that universities and research centres will provide this support out of the goodness of their heart. Admittedly, some (MANY) universities will demand a cut from the grant amount for overhead costs. But for example, CONACYT (the Mexican research council) doesn’t pay overhead. Many granting agencies and foundations don’t, or if they do, it’s a minimal portion (10% of the total grant costs).

Given my own experience with grant funding (I’ve had 2 external grants, 2 internal grants and 2 consultancy contracts in the past four years), I know for a fact that undertaking a funded project requires of scholars to be able to comply with all the administrative burden of submitting invoices, reimbursements, booking spaces, travel arrangements, payments for conference registration, flights, accomodation.

I don’t want to have to deal with this. It’s not what I did a PhD for.

I do hope that in the future, all granting agencies and foundations will understand that when a researcher budgets money for a research manager and/or an administrative assistant, it’s because we NEED them. I’m not a fan of administrative bloat, as they call it, but research managers, research assistants and administrative assistants? We certainly need them. I wouldn’t be as successful as I am if I hadn’t had the support staff that I did for the projects I’ve undertaken. I hope I’ll be able to continue to find a way to fund these positions.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 13, 2016

Experts Workshop on E-Waste Governance in the United States and Mexico #UCMEXUSEWaste

This past week, Dr. Kate O’Neill (University of California, Berkeley) and I (Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega, Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Económicas, CIDE) co-organized an experts workshop on the governance of electronic waste in Mexico and the United States.

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This workshop is one of the components of the project Kate and I are undertaking to understand variations in patterns of governance of electronic waste, be it in the formal or the informal sector.

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UC MEXUS CONACYT E Waste Workshop July 2016 038We brought together a group of experts from all over the country to discuss the similarities, differences, opportunities and challenges that governing electronic waste brings forth. We were able to conduct the workshop thanks to generous funding from the University of California Institute for Mexico-US Studies, through a grant to Dr. O’Neill and myself from the UCMEXUS-CONACYT Collaborative Grants program. Our project (funded within the 2013 cohort) is entitled: “Exploring models of electronic wastes governance in the United States and Mexico: Recycling, risk and environmental justice” (in Spanish: Explorando modelos de gobernanza de residuos electrónicos en los Estados Unidos y México: Reciclaje, riesgo y justicia ambiental).

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We are extraordinarily grateful to UCMEXUS for the collaborative opportunities that this project afforded Dr. O’Neill and myself. Through the workshop, we were able not only to bring together several experts to share their knowledge and expertise with us, but we were also able to find major gaps in the literature that a series of future collaborative projects can address.

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Throughout the workshop, we found that it was important and fundamental to share our knowledge with as many people as possible. Therefore, Kate and I have decided to make access to the presentations, minutes and results from the project Open Access (with permission of the UCMEXUS CONACYT Grant program).

Here is the Flickr photo set of the photos I took during the workshop. Thanks again to UCMEXUS CONACYT Collaborative Grants program for facilitating this workshop. You can also read the tweets I sent during the workshop using the hashtag #UCMEXUSEWaste.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 11, 2016