Teaching Public Policy, Public Administration and Public Management

I have taught Public Policy, Public Management and Public Administration for more than a decade now, and I have always used my blog as a mode of self-reflective engagement. This particular page collates my thoughts on how to improve my own teaching and what kinds of things I want to teach my students.

Here, I have collated blog posts I’ve written over the years on my own self-reflections about teaching public policy, public administration and public management. This includes summaries of books I’ve read, listings of case studies and the case study method of teaching public administration, etc.

Implementing Public Policy: An Introduction to the Study of Operational Governance (Hill & Hupe)

This post summarizes my reading notes of the Hill and Hupe policy implementation book, a really interesting coauthored volume where these authors integrate the implementation studies literature with the governance body of scholarly works. The result is quite interesting, as my blog post shows.

Comparative Policy Studies (Engeli and Rothmayr Allison, Eds. 2014, Palgrave McMillan)

My reading notes of an edited volume on comparative policy studies that Drs. Isabelle Engeli and Christine Rothmayr Allison compiled and published in 2014 with Palgrave McMillan. For those of us who do comparative studies of public policy, this is The Book we were waiting for.

Contemporary Policy Analysis (Mintrom 2012, Oxford University Press)

My notes on Michael Mintrom’s Contemporary Policy Analysis. I had always eschewed the possibility of adopting a textbook since I liked so many of them and I also wanted to use journal articles and book chapters. But Mintrom proved an excellent teaching

Policy analysis as a clinical profession (“Thinking Like a Policy Analyst”, Iris Geva-May, Ed., Palgrave McMillan US)

I am always interested in teaching my public policy students new skills. In this blog post, I review Dr. Iris Geva-May’s 2005 edited volume “Thinking Like a Policy Analyst” and relate it to my experience teaching public policy. I loved Dr. Geva-May and her contributors’ emphasis on approaching policy analysis as a clinical task.

Writing policy content: Tips for students and educators

One of the biggest challenges I find in teaching public policy theories and analysis is that my students often don’t know what a policy briefing or a policy memorandum look like. In this post I offer some advice on how to write good policy content.

Youth unemployment, teaching hire-able skills and the duty of a professor

Anyone who has taken courses with me (or who has worked with me in any capacity, as a research assistant or as an academic colleague) knows I’m obsessed with providing my students (both undergraduate and graduate) with a set of employable or hire-able skills. In this post I explain the reason why I focus on teaching applied courses in public policy and policy analysis.

On the importance of fieldwork for empirical research in public policy

While I acknowledge myself as a multi-methods scholar, and I have done quantitative work, much of my empirical work involves qualitative data. Conducting structured and semi-structured interviews, engaging in participant observation, and running focus groups, are all forms of qualitative research. In this post I argue that fieldwork is fundamental for public policy research and teaching, regardless of qualitative or quantitative traditions of data analysis.

The challenges of being a public policy professor and a public intellectual

We are required as academics to have an impact on policy. This impact often has negative consequences for our own research, and here I discuss why this may be the case. It’s challenging to be a professor of public policy and also maintain a public persona, online and offline.

Why teach spatial analysis in a public policy school?

This is a very brief reflection on why I push for spatial analysis and geographical information systems at CIDE Region Centro, since our students in Public Policy might benefit.

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