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Teaching Citizens to be Policy Analysts or Policy Analysts to be Citizens

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 May 2020

Ronald S. Oakerson
Ronald S. Oakerson*
Affiliation:
Marshall University
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Extract

This essay may be considered a brief report to the discipline on a three year project designed to integrate citizenship and public policy education. Supported by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), an agency of the U.S. Department of Education, the project established an on-going “Workshop in Citizenship and Public Policy” in the Department of Political Science at Marshall University. Although students enroll in “workshop” as for any other course, traditional classroom methods are abandoned in an effort to engage students actively in field research related to policy problems in West Virginia. The highlight of the project is a workshop product — the West Virginia Citizens’ Almanac, to be published annually as a guide to citizen participation in the Mountain State. The almanac is intended to give direction and focus to workshop activity, bring students into an effective working relationship with current issues of citizenship and public policy, and at the same time reach out to citizens in a way that might foster greater interaction between higher education and the wider, less formal, processes of learning in a democratic society.

Type
Research Article
Information
News for Teachers of Political Science , Volume 42 , Summer 1984 , pp. 2 - 3
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1984

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References

Notes

1 Financial support for the preparation of this paper was provided by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, U.S. Department of Education. Henry Aaron Bell was project assistant and contributed to the ideas found herein.

2 Wildavsky, Aaron pursues a similar line of reasoning, to which I am indebted, in an essay on “Citizens as Analysts,” Chapter 11 in his Speaking Truth to Power: The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979), pp. 252–279CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 As an orientation to the techniques of personal interviewing our students read Murphy, Jerome T., Getting the Facts: A Fieldwork Guide for Evaluators and Policy Analysts (Santa Monica, Calif.: Goodyear Publishing Company, Inc., 1980Google Scholar

4 Wildavsky, op. cit., p. 255.

5 Ibid., pp. 256-257.

6 See “Separating the Planning and Procurement of Public Services from their Production and Delivery,” an essay by Downs, Anthony which appears as Chapter 12 in his Urban Problems and Prospects, second ed. (Chicago: Rand McNally College Publishing Company, 1976), pp. 227–242Google Scholar.

7 Ostrom, Vincent and Ostrom, Elinor, “Public Goods and Public Choices,’ in Savas, E.S., ed.. Alternatives for Delivering Public Services (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1977), pp. 7–14Google Scholar.

8 Whitaker, Gordon P., “Coproduction: Citizen Participation in Service Delivery.” Public Administration Review 40 (1980): pp. 240–246CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Tocqueville's Democracy in America, especially volume I, chapter 5.

10 Dewey, John, The Public and Its Problems (Chicago; Swallow Press, 1927), p. 180Google Scholar.