JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS EDUCATION - naspaa

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Badgers & Hoosiers: An Interstate Collaborative Learning Experience Connecting MPA Students in Wisconsin and Indiana full-day Saturday sessions that met every three weeks, from February 2 through the end of April. It became necessary to map out a time-and-action calendar in early January, in order to ensure that students had appropriate time frames for completing various components of the assignments, and that the classes would have some uniformity as the shared project evolved. We determined that interactive logistics, which had proven somewhat unwieldy in the fall semester, primarily should take the form of direct contact between student partners from each class. The assignment for each class used U.S. Census and other factual data for an analysis (community scan) of the partner school’s community. A one-on-one telephone interview with a counterpart in the other class used a structured interview form developed by the instructors. Because the UWO semester started later, students there received names and e- mail addresses of their IUN counterparts, and were instructed to contact them promptly for interviews that lasted 30 minutes and longer. Another consideration in designing the collaborative project was determining the final products to be generated by students from each campus. Based on existing coursework and class schedules, the assignments varied in their implementations. At the conclusion of the community-scan component, and following an analysis of interview data, IUN students were required to produce an analysis of their group’s self-organizing behavior, and to reference concepts from course lectures and interpretations of the Bolman and Deal “frames” (2003). Students were asked to compare the way their group established its method of tackling assignments with key characteristics of the organizational frames they studied in class. Several students noted that analyzing their own organizing behavior helped clarify course concepts from organization theory. Results showed that two of the teams adopted the bureaucratic frame (with one person directing the project, assigning tasks, and monitoring progress), while two other teams clearly were comfortable with strategies from the human resource frame (where each team member assumes a role that fits the project’s needs, and works with a high level of autonomy). Two other teams operated a little more chaotically, and completed their projects by improvising and adapting to changes in the environment, and in response to other team members’ participation levels. These team members recognized that their divergent interests and unpredictable behaviors encouraged organizing strategies that were characteristic of the political frame: bargaining, negotiation, and coalition-building. None of the groups recognized in its behavior the hallmarks of the symbolic frame — to build and identify with a shared culture. Some students postulated that their involvement with one another was of too short a time for these subtler distinctions to emerge. Everyone ultimately agreed that the “Organization as Theater” concept existed in all groups. 354 Journal of Public Affairs Education
Badgers & Hoosiers: An Interstate Collaborative Learning Experience Connecting MPA Students in Wisconsin and Indiana The UWO class incorporated community scan information and an analysis of the interview data into a mini-social-science research project that was submitted at the last class meeting, in addition to being sent back to IUN. While not statistically significant, their findings included the observation that IUN students had many reasons for entering a graduate program, and that the primary value of completing the degree program was because of its applicability to their work situations. Beyond this, IUN students believed that the primary value of public administration is to improve society. STUDENT RESPONSE In a 2005 Journal of Public Affairs Education (JPAE) article, Alice Schumaker reported on her empirical study to investigate the perspective of 100 MPA students at the University of Nebraska-Omaha on group projects. Although her main thrust was to identify the skills developed during group projects that most successfully transferred into the workplace, the point most applicable to this undertaking was Schumaker’s observation that “[P]art of the joy of graduate education is to build friendships and professional relationship,” and that “[I]nstructors should be aware of opportunities to foster student friendships” (p. 33). Since our earliest efforts to engage classes in shared learning activities, students have been intrigued by the idea of interacting with students from other institutions. For example, even though they had no direct interaction with one another after the chopstick exercise, our students enthusiastically participated in discussing similarities and differences between the two groups’ responses, and the students’ perceptions of being connected to the concepts explored in each class. During the fall of 2007, in the first full-blown attempt to involve our classes in a single, integrated, collaborative-learning project, students in both classes displayed confusion over what the project was supposed to accomplish and how it was to be logistically managed. Although writing and submitting an abstract for consideration by the ICMA publication, seeking feedback from group members in another class, and giving feedback on this feedback all were appropriate assignments for both classes, the logistics of implementing these activities was a nightmare that nearly made management of the project take precedence over its substance. Students were further confused by the fact that the instructors used the collaborative project to implement somewhat different goals in the two classes. Responses to critiques of the abstract from colleagues in partner classes were generally positive, but both instructors observed a bit of competitive “chestthumping” on each side throughout the project. For instance, an IUN group’s response to the critique of their abstract by a UWO class in the fall semester of 2007 included the following comments: Journal of Public Affairs Education 355
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Public Values As a Core Element of
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