WINTER 2012 - National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and ...

Didactic Changes
Class Rooms
Pedagogical reform 1.
PA faculty, no matter their specialty, should offer students more
assignments and information concerning social class inequalities, including how
inheritances shape public sector operations. Recent work by Wyatt-Nichol et
al. (2011) illustrates how instructors in different PA subfields (e.g., budgeting,
administrative law, and human resources) can do this.
Two years ago, I published an article showing how faculty can approach
this same instructional objective, but through unconventional assignments
(Oldfield, 2010d; available online without restriction). My article detailed, for
example, how PA professors can (a) use the board game Monopoly to demonstrate
the distorting effects of inherited financial capital; (b) show students that data
universities fail to collect can significantly disadvantage people of working-class
origins, thereby illustrating “policy making by omission”; (c) use simulations to
show how seemingly neutral personnel standards can reinforce existing social
class inequalities; (d) show that even the democratic-sounding “bureaucratic
team building” can overlook the needs of working-class employees; and (e)
use existing literature to construct their own recommendations for reducing
socioeconomic inequalities. I used a critical theory framework in developing this
paper, knowing it would hearten other instructors to devise and employ their
own counterintuitive techniques for helping students appreciate the causes and
consequences of class inequalities.
Pedagogical reform 2.
PA faculty should share their experiences and research on proven ways
of helping students analyze class inequalities and assumptions. The national
PAT-Net, Teaching PA, and NAPA Standing Panel on Social Equity annual
conferences would be ideal venues for communicating these insights. Later, the
conference papers should appear as articles in academic journals so others can
benefit from the authors’ findings and discussion.
Faculty should not confine their integrative works to direct instruction, but
should pursue other student-oriented concerns such as organizing conference
panels about welcoming, supporting, and mentoring students from humble
backgrounds. Again, the presenters should submit their conference papers for
publication in academic periodicals.
Pedagogical reform 3.
An anonymous referee recommended I mention a few fiction and nonfiction
sources that will increase PA faculty and students’ empathy toward social class inequal
ities. Besides the various materials listed throughout this article and the other
papers included in this symposium, I recommend, to begin, these publications.
Journal of Public Affairs Education 43