Abstract
This article discusses the reasons and teaching objectives of an array of new undergraduate courses on public administration and public policy management which have emerged recently in Brazil. While in 2001 there were only two undergraduate courses teaching formal public administration in the country, by 2015, they had risen to 40, and also included more diverse but related courses, such as public policy management, public management, public policy, and other similar ones. If one adds to this figure, distance education, and technological undergraduate courses, the total courses in these areas in Brazil amount to approximately 130 and an estimate of 25,600 students’ enrolments. All these courses are understood as belonging to the same field of knowledge, a statement made public by a national movement of professors, course coordinators, and students that stated the specificities and identity of this field of knowledge. This group became known as “The Public Field” movement, declaring the need for training students and future practitioners or academics within courses that are concerned with the public interest and democratic, and ethical governments. The discussion in the article focuses on two main aspects. First, the institutional and political reasons that opened a “window of opportunity” for these courses to emerge in Brazil. Second, the pedagogical objectives of these courses are discussed, and two experiences of innovative teaching in two Brazilian universities are presented as an example of the training objectives these courses are trying to achieve.
Keywords
Introduction
Although the Brazilian federation is considered a quite large bureaucratic system, with many layers of service provision and an estimated 10 million people working at the direct public administration on the three levels of governments (IPEA, 2011), curiously academic courses exclusively focused on the studies of public administration, public policy management or similar ones are quite new to the educational system.
Concerning specifically undergraduate courses, the focus of this article, a significant number of courses have appeared from the mid-2000s alone. In 2001, there were only two undergraduate courses teaching exclusively public administration (none of them public policy) – and 145 enrolled students, 29 courses in 2005 (again only public administration) – and around 2,000 students (Gonçalves, 2014: 25–26). However, by 2013, new courses had emerged, not only on public administration but also on public policy, public policy management, social management, and public management. According to Pires et al. (2014: 122), in 2013, there were 200 courses being offered in different modalities and parts of the country, and an estimation of around 50,000 enrolled undergraduate students.
This is not say that other forms of training practitioners, or an interest in public administration and public policy studies, did not exist in Brazil before these new undergraduate courses. Quite the contrary, there has been a growing interest in public policy research (therefore, publications) for the last 20 years, but limited to research and graduate students of Masters and Doctorate programs, and as a subfield in other traditional areas, especially in political science and administration. Hence, graduate academic courses exclusively dedicated to the issues of public affairs (such as public policy studies) are still a rarity within the Brazilian postgraduate system and also within the research fomented by scientific agencies in Brazil.
However, with the rapid expansion of undergraduate courses forming exclusively, as the main area, public policy or public administration specialists, this scenario is bond to change in the near future. As the number of students graduating in public policy increases, it is expected a raise in the number of masters and doctorate programs dedicated exclusively to public policy, public administration or, as we called it in Brazil, the area concerned with the study of “public issues”.
Given this ongoing growth in teaching public policy and public administration in Brazil, we raise two main questions in this article: 1) What are the reasons that explain the emergence of these new courses? and 2) How do these new undergraduate courses differ from the traditional ones?
Concerning the first issue, two main institutional landmarks explain these new courses. First, the historical events related to the expected role of the Brazilian State defined at the end of the transition from the authoritarian, military regime to democracy. Some of these changes involved the types of services to be publicly provided by the State, including the three levels of governments in the Brazilian federation, and the principle of participatory mechanisms throughout all the stages of public policy-making, hence elevating the demand not only for more civil servants but also for a new type of professional. The second institutional landmark is the approval of a national law in 2007 – named REUNI – which created strong financial incentives for public federal universities to create new courses or to expand existing ones. This resulted into a rapid expansion of undergraduate courses and enrolments in general and just the same in the cases of public administration, public policy, and related fields. In fact, it is reasonable to assume that the demand for these courses already existed, prior to the REUNI Program, but they had to wait this “window of opportunity” opened by REUNI to implement their ideas.
The expansion of these new courses, in turn, produced a vacuum of regulation as they were seen by some as a subfield of business administration studies and by others as an autonomous field with its own distinguished characteristics from business administration. What follows is the organization of a national movement of professors and coordinators that defended specific regulation for these courses within “the Public Field”. Students also organized themselves to support the demand for specific regulations for these new courses.
In this sense, in Brazil, the “Public Field” movement is in clear opposition to the notion of private interests defining alone policy priorities that affect the whole society, and also contained an understanding that the courses and research in the area of public administration are not a subfield of business administration, which until then was treated as such in Brazil. The resulting movement was the definition of national curriculum guidelines specifically designed for these courses and, more recently, the foundation of a National Association representing (and formally institutionalizing) this movement.
Regarding the reasons that would justify the creation of specific undergraduate public policy courses, the case of Brazil follows the specificities quoted in the international literature regarding what are public policy studies: 1) a concern with empirical public problems (“problem-oriented”), 2) multidisciplinary, as policy processes present a multi-set of possible analytical perspectives from different academic disciplines, and 3) “value-oriented” in the sense that is deliberately normative in opposition to a purely objective and/or technical approach (deLeon, 2008; deLeon and Martell, 2006; deLeon and Vogenbeck, 2007; Mintrom and Williams, 2013). As we will discuss later on, although multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are common features of these courses, it is well known the difficulties to make them work in practice – in a world where all institutional (or academic) settings are divided into “university departments” (Brewer, 1999; de Faria, 2013). The Educational Projects of these courses, thus, propose new teaching methods in order to provide multidisciplinary view of social problems.
In order to produce an effective multidisciplinary environment, two strategies have been adopted within these new undergraduate courses. The first is creating a diverse faculty in terms of degrees. A multidisciplinary group of professors is meant to be able to achieve not only the teaching from different disciplinary perspectives but also to improve the chances of producing effective interdisciplinary activities. Second, students of public policy and public administration courses are exposed to an array of applied activities in order to practice theoretical learning in quasi-real environments, where working in groups, problem-solving activities, and interaction with real public agencies or organizations are understood as ways to achieve these objectives.
The aim of this article is, thus, to discuss the context and reasons that explain the emergence of these new courses and to present some of the teaching innovations, especially in two aspects: how to produce effective multidisciplinary environments, and how to engage students and professors in applied and social responsible activities that can stimulate applying theoretical knowledge into practice. Section 1 presents the political-institutional context for the emergence of these courses and the role of the “Public Field” movement. Section 2 gives an overall view of the teaching innovations and specificities within these courses and presents two cases of teaching-learning innovation techniques in two courses. Finally, some considerations about future challenges are discussed.
Section 1 – The historical-institutional context for the emergence of undergraduate courses in public policy and public administration in Brazil
As pointed out in the Introduction, this section presents the historical reasons that explain the recent raise in public policy and public administration undergraduate courses in Brazil. Two main institutional landmarks will be discussed: the new expected role of the State as enacted by the 1988 democratic Brazilian Constitution, and a law that contained strong financial incentives to create new courses in public Universities, enacted in 2007.
Throughout the last three decades of institutional changes in Brazil, since the end of the authoritarian regime, two needs that are directly connected with our discussion here emerged: 1) the need to map social needs and policy alternatives that would respond to the democratic policy agenda – which produced a raise on academic studies in public policies, and 2) a need for specialized professionals able to think and act in highly complex bureaucratic systems, dealing with interdisciplinary issues, in different government levels (central, state, and local governments) and with a new attitude concerning effective popular consultation.
Concerning the first issue, the most striking reason is to do with the changes in the institutional role of the State in the aftermath of the transition from an authoritarian (1964–1985) to a democratic regime in Brazil at the end of the 1980s. Since the enactment of the democratic constitution in 1988, the Brazilian State is expected to provide large amounts of public services, a lot of them for universal and free access (in fact, in an opposite direction of other national contexts throughout the world at that time, where emerging neoliberal policies produced the defense of a reduction of the role of the State in society and the economy, including neighboring countries such as Chile and Argentina, among the first to adopt neoliberal policies in Latin America).
The Constitution was approved amidst discourses and ideas demanding a rupture with the military authoritarian regime in many aspects, including the definition of universal social rights and publicly provided social services (Gomes, 2006, 2012a). So, for example, the constitution established a public and free health system for all Brazilian citizens, social services/security access were thought to be expanded for the first time to an universal form, besides the amplification of previous rights, such as free education in all state-run schools, which includes higher education. Given the historical levels of poverty and huge degrees of inequalities within the country, constitution-makers bet on the ideal of raising a significant part of the population, historically excluded, to minimal social standards and opportunities.
Additionally, the 1988 constitution also attributed to local governments (municipalities) not only political autonomy and relative fiscal autonomy (Gomes, 2012b) but also the role of providers of social services within their jurisdictions. This decision was part of the ideas in the 1980s and 1990s were decentralization was seen as a movement towards more democracy and efficacy of public services (Arretche, 1996; Gomes, 2010). Indeed, and although the other two levels of governments in Brazil (federal and state-level) also provide social services, the vast majority of municipalities’ spending money in Brazil is on social policies. As Arretche et al. (2014: 159) point out, in 2006, 70% of overall spending for all Brazilian municipalities was in the following areas: education/culture, health services, housing, and social assistance/social security. Indeed, after two decades from the enactment of the 1988 constitution, Brazilian municipalities have a central role in the provision of social services, and these services need personnel, either for direct provision or to manage policy systems. We will return to this point in what follows.
A final remark concerning the 1988 constitution is that the transition process to democracy also end up defining a central role for civil, popular participation not only concerning the overseeing of public policies, but especially participating in the decision-making process by influencing, for example, policy priorities. The example of the Participatory Budgeting in Brazil is probably the most famous form of popular participation in the definition of policy priorities but there are thousands of councils with different types of civil society representation in the three levels of governments nowadays in Brazil. 1 For our objectives here, it is enough to point out that this new type of governance also demanded a new type of professional, able to incorporate popular hearings and demands into the public policy process. This also meant a rupture with traditional bureaucratic forms of management both institutionally and culturally.
A significant proportion of the growing research interest for the last 20 years is, therefore, the result of these profound changes in the role of the State and the resulting need to understand them.
Although many of the ideals enacted in the 1988 Constitution were only implemented after many reforms carried out by subsequent Brazilian Presidents, that took office from the 1990s onwards, for our purposes here, it suffice to say that this new institutional setting created a very large and complex bureaucratic system by the amplification of the scope of State action; raised exponentially the amount of existing public policies and introduced popular consultation as a desired ordinary activity of policy-making. At this point, we can say that a demand for a new type of civil servant – quite different from the traditional bureaucratic “Weberian-style” – was in place. Ideally, someone that could plan, formulate viable alternatives in consonance with popular consultation, monitor implementation, to correct errors of implementation, evaluate results and to publicize them. In sum, professionals specifically trained in managing public policies.
This was, in short, the institutional setting that influenced the interest in public policy and public administration since the enactment of the 1988 constitution. However, it was the approval of a national law, in 2007, that provided strong incentives for public universities from the federal network of higher education to propose new undergraduate courses in public policy and public administration. As we will see, this movement irradiated to other state-level and also private universities and colleges since then.
The approval of REUNI 2 law in 2007 (Restructuring and Expansion of Federal Universities Program, in Portuguese) aimed to expand the number of enrolments in public universities by transferring financial resources to Universities that had approved a plan for either expanding current courses or proposing new ones. The financial resources could be used for the construction of new buildings and scientific infrastructure such as labs and other infrastructure facilities, it included the financing of construction of new campus away from capital cities and large cities (which concentrate vast majority of Universities in Brazil), guaranteed the selection of new professors to act in these courses, etc. In sum, the law created strong incentives to propose new courses in general and public policy and public administration courses were one of those. In 2007, 53 federal universities in Brazil had joined the expansion Program by proposing new courses or the expansion of current ones.
As Table 1 shows, spending for this program started in 2008, one year after the approval of the law. The figures in Brazilian Reais (R$) have been adjusted for inflation (base is December 2014). The figures show a progressive spending year by year, reaching a total of R$8 billion for the period 2008–2014 or an average of R$1 billion per year. In 2014, for example, the spending in the REUNI Program corresponded to 2.8% of total spending on education in the Federal Government Budget. Converted to US$, the total amount spent in REUNI Program from 2008 to 2014 was around U$3 billion or an average of U$440 million per year.
Spending on the expansion of federal universities Program (REUNI) by year. Brazil, 2008–2014 (in R$ restated to December 2014*).
Source: Own elaboration with information from Portal da Transparência Governo Federal – portaldatransparencia.gov.br (action number: 8282 – REUNI).
* by the inflation index, IPC-A, IBGE/Brazil.
** exchange rate used for the conversion R$ into US$ as of 31 December 2014.
Access to higher education is considered very low and unequally distributed among social groups in Brazil: in 2009, for example, only 24% of 18–24-year-olds had accessed higher education (public or private). According to the 1988 Constitution, all state-run schools must be free of charge, from nursing schools to Public Universities. Therefore, to expand the access of students to public Universities (institutions which, in the Brazilian case, produce the vast majority of quality research and innovation in the country, with few exceptions from the private sector) was at the same time desirable but also a very expensive and time consuming policy. As the expansion of only public enrolments was quite limited, the government also adopted other strategies of subsidizing university fees for students from low-income families and established agreements with private colleges and universities as a complementary way to expand access to higher education.
The REUNI federal Program produced the desired objective of expanding enrolments in public universities in Brazil. In this context, the courses of public administration, public policies and other with similar designations had an expressive expansion in the period as Table 2 shows.
Number of academic undergraduate courses on public administration, public policy, public policy management and public management by year of creation. Excludes courses on distant education and technological education.
Source: Own elaboration with information from e-MEC/Brazil (http://emec.mec.gov.br/).
As can be seen from Table 2, around 67% of the courses in public administration, public policy and other similar ones were created after REUNI first spending year (2008–2015). Although we do not have a precise number for total enrolments at this point, a conservative estimate points to 6,000 students.
Two observations concerning the information presented in Table 2 is important to highlight. First, this table excludes new courses which are prepared to receive students (in 2015) but that are still finalizing their registration and authorization procedures at the Brazilian Ministry of Education. This information has not yet been made public. Second, this table excludes undergraduate courses in public administration that are taught in the Distance Education modality (estimated by the Ministry of Education to be 40 courses around the country and with a conservative estimate of around 15,500 current enrolments); another modality that in Brazil is called technological training in higher education in public administration, public policy, and the like, estimated to be 49 courses and around 4,100 enrolments (Vendramini, 2013). If all these provisional estimates are taken into account, the current number of enrolments in all types of undergraduate courses in Brazil in the areas of public administration, public policy and other similar ones would be at least 25,600.
It is possible to argue that the REUNI policy program created the opportunity for a demand that existed in the academic field of public administration – in this case, expansion – but specially in the public policy, public policy management, and public management undergraduate courses, which did not exist before the REUNI program, with the one exception in the country being the course at University of Sao Paulo (USP) – not a federal University but state-level University – which created the Public Policy Management course in 2005.
As mentioned in the introduction of this article, these new courses produced a vacuum of regulation as they were seen by some as a subfield of administration studies and by others as an autonomous field with its own distinguished characteristics from business administration. What follows is the organization of a national movement of professors and coordinators of these new courses that named themselves as “the Public Field” group. At approximately the same time, students from these courses organized themselves into an organization (the National Federation of Students from the Public Field – FENEAP, in Portuguese) and not only supported the professors’ demands for specific regulation but actually got involved in mobilization activities that added more representation to the movement.
Therefore, the expansion of courses from REUNI led to the creation of this group of professors, which started to gather in 2005 and grew to a significant national representing level by 2010 when the first discussions on regulation started. This group covers the undergraduate courses of Public Administration, Public Policy Management, Public Management, Social Management, and Public Policy in Brazilian universities. In terms of a definition, the group defines the “Public Field” as a multidisciplinary field of teaching, research and technical-political practices, in the Social Sciences and the Humanities, concerned with themes, problems and issues of public interest, collective welfare and social inclusive policies, in a renewed republican perspective when facing government actions, movements of the civil society and in the interaction between government and society in the pursuit of sustainable socio-economic development, within a context of deepening democracy. (Pires et al., 2014: 112)
Having presented the historical-institutional features that explain the emergence of these new courses, we now turn to the educational aspects of them.
Section 2 – Overall view of the teaching-learning innovations and specificities of the undergraduate courses in public administration and public policy in Brazil
This section discusses what this new emerging undergraduate courses offer that differentiate them from other courses. We give first, an overall evaluation of the Educational aims of these courses. Second, we present specifically two cases of innovative methods of teaching/learning adopted in two undergraduate courses in Brazil as an example of the current attempts to achieve the epistemological and practical objectives professed by the “Public Field” movement: the case of the Workshops in Public Policy and the case of the Residency in Public Policy.
As pointed out briefly in the previous section of this article, these courses are innovating in many ways: in the way to think about public policies, in the academic production concerning managing public policies, in the multiplication of specific undergraduate and graduate courses, aiming to produce a new type of professional with enough skills to be able to participate in the formulation, implementation, analysis, and evaluation of public policies.
The transformations that took place in public managing in contemporary Brazil, for example, the creation of institutionalized spaces for social, popular participation, incorporated new social actors in the policy-making process by extending direct participation of the civil society within democratic governance. In this sense, the new courses of the “Public Field” propose to innovate in the way of comprehending the stages of formulation, implementation and evaluation of public policies.
Within the higher education system in Brazil, we are watching an intense debate among researchers from the “Public Field” who are focused on understanding the contemporary processes that guide public management within State and public-non-state organizations and the correlated need to innovate in terms of teaching/learning within the field.
Examples of themes that have been recurrent among the Universities offering these new courses in Brazil are:
Relations between the State/Government and Society Governmental Planning, Governance and Governability Intergovernmental Relations within a Federation Participation, Social Control and Citizenship The issues concerning intersectoriality (among different areas or sectors within the government apparatus responsible to manage a common public policy) and inter-institutional (among different institutions inside or outside government areas) Intragovernmental litigation Cooperative Models for Public Policy Public managing tools, including technologies, management tools and strategic planning/formulation Fiscal Capacity and Budget Execution Monitoring and Evaluating Public Policies
Themes such as these guide the Educational Projects of these new courses and, in terms of professional education, intends to produce a person who is able to develop and diffuse new technologies and techniques, to propose social innovation and to promote processes that contribute to the strengthening of the public sphere, qualifying and improving governmental actions and also intensifying and extending the forms of civil society participation in the conduction of issues that are of a public interest. (Letter from the Public Field movement, April 2013)
In order to achieve this epistemological ideal, one of the crucial steps is the intellectual diversity of faculty members, aimed at producing real interdisciplinary interaction and teaching. So, professors might come from different traditional areas such as political science, sociology, anthropology, economy, law, administration, urban planning, geography, and others.
The objective in this case is to have a multidisciplinary faculty that can produce new experiences by training students, future professionals, to be able to dialogue with these different areas (by knowing the main discussion within these fields of knowledge) and also different professional from traditional fields (when practicing in the real world work environment). Besides that, a crucial point is to stimulate critical thinking of students’ realities in a clear opposition to training a mere uncritical executors of policies.
In our view, to produce a more adequate training of our future graduated students, more suitable to the challenges of the 21st century, a manager of policies should be able to improve the quality of public services in a democratic way, ethically-oriented, and counting on effective participation from the people affected by policy decisions. Concerning the Brazilian reality, besides the urgent need of governments in the three levels of the Brazilian Federation, but specially the cases of municipal and state-levels governments, of trained professionals who are able to formulate, monitor implementation and evaluate public policies, it is also necessary to be able to develop the skill of working within a participatory environment, applying a global, interdisciplinary view of issues at stake and based on the principles of social justice and effective participation in the decision-making process and management of public policies.
Although we do not have yet a systematic evaluation of all courses in Brazil, some preliminary impressions can be pointed out so we can contribute to this ongoing discussion about the undergraduate courses that belong to the “Public Field” and especially the type of public manager/administrator we aim to produce for the 21st century.
Most of the educational projects of these new undergraduate courses present as objectives a generalist, multidisciplinary education by adopting a flexible curriculum. Generalist and multidisciplinary in the sense that students of these courses will not become specialists in traditional areas of knowledge but rather will have a general view of issues or problems from the perspectives of different disciplinary fields, such as political science, economy, urban planning, sociology, etc. The most challenging issue, in this respect, is to elevate the chances that students trained in multidisciplinary environments will have more skills to achieve, in the future, effective interdisciplinary research and ways of thinking. Interdisciplinarity here is understood as moving from “knowing” the discussions from different fields to effectively producing solutions (and academic thinking) that interconnect knowledge from different fields. It is a bet upon the impact that these courses might have on future academics and practitioners. It is worth noting that “promoting interdisciplinarity” is a recurrent demand from Brazilian education authorities, including fomenting scientific agencies, based on the argument that it is necessary to overcome traditional, seen as outdated, curricula (CAPES, 2014).
Curriculum flexibility is seen as part of the strategy to achieve this precisely because it would be practically impossible for a single course to provide all the training within the many (thousands?) of potential subjects and themes that could interest a student of public policy.
Curriculum flexibility means, in practical terms, giving the student open options to choose specific subjects or activities that might produce either specialization in a certain issue or to reach more general views of public-related issue that are not contemplated in his or her course curriculum but it might be available in other courses at the university.
It is easy to imagine that virtually any subject of the many that are traditionally studied could be an object of study in the public administration and public policy field. To give only one very typical example: think of environmental issues and their various possibilities of being analysed from different traditional separated fields of knowledge. It could be dealt by sociologists, biologists, lawyers, engineers, even mathematicians if you want to produce, say, statistical estimates, etc. But this need to have a multidisciplinary approach to social issues is not restricted to the environment, it could similarly be argued concerning, for example, education, as there are many aspects of a potential social problem that demands a multidisciplinary approach in the search of a solution, say, for instance, aspects that influence student’s performance, which is not restricted to pedagogical issues as this phenomenon is also affected by social conditions, family dynamics, cultural aspects, etc. So, giving the options of choice to students is a crucial aspect of these new courses. Although this might not be an issue in most undergraduate courses in other countries, in Brazil still prevails courses with few – and sometimes none – available choices for students to either choose subjects outside their course curriculum or to choose, within the course curriculum, which subjects to study. 3
An overview of the curriculum structures of the courses from the “Public Field” shows the presence of subjects dealings with current issues such as current discussions of the theories between State and Society; social, economic, and political development in the contemporary world; organization and functioning of public or social institutions and agencies; and analysis of each level of government in Brazil focusing social institutions, and types or models of public management; applied exercises regarding planning and managing public policies, etc.
This preliminary evaluation of the Educational Projects, suggests, in sum, the common objective of training a student so she can have a general view of the many complex aspects that involve managing public policies. In applied terms, this student should be able to at least being able to see the typical complexities of public policy development: the challenge of planning, to find viable institutional alternatives not only in technical or fiscal terms but also in terms of political support; the need for systematic monitoring of policy implementation (policies, as we know, do fail!), the need to transform the culture of evaluation, introducing it as an ordinary part of public policy-managing; the capacity to see the political and social actors involved in the policy-making process and to identify the interests that they represent; the need to hear the population affected by the policy proposal in an effective way instead of just fulfilling a formal, bureaucratic requirement. Given the amount of social needs in the contemporary Brazilian society, a thoroughly list of all the skills needed from this future professional could become endless.
However, the main message seems to develop skills in such a way that students are able to see solutions that have not been thought before, a capacity to have an ample view of the public policy process and its management that, in practical terms, could established effective dialogues with different traditional fields of knowledge. Finally, it seems to us that these courses have assumed that, in order to promote real interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity has got to be taught from the start, promoting this ideal and this approach from the first classes in the course.
We now turn to two examples of innovative teaching and learning activities that might help to exemplify the specific attempts within these new courses.
New teaching-learning practice 1: The case of the workshops in public policy
At the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), Brazil, an undergraduate course in Public Policy Management is in place since 2009. The course appeared as a direct result of the incentives from the REUNI Program, as discussed in the first section of this article. The Educational Project of the course is quite different from traditional undergraduate courses and one of the innovative teaching-learning practices is the activity “Workshops in Public Policies”.
The Workshop in Public Policy is presented here as one example of innovative teaching-learning methods based on the epistemic framework advocated by the “Public Affairs” group. The educational project of this course departs from “formation axes”, five thematic groups of training, each one developing specific abilities and expertise.
All formation axes combine theoretical and technical–instrumental classes. Concerning traditional theoretical subjects, the course also adopts a teaching innovation as their hours are shorter in comparison with the standard 60-hour classes per term 4 : 45, 30 and even 15-hour classes per term and per subject. The only exception is the Workshop in Public Policies, as we will see further on. This different format demands, thus, the need to practice innovate teaching methods (or teaching strategies) in the classroom. The assumption here is that in order to produce multidisciplinary learning it is more important for students to have a general overview of many subjects rather than less subjects but more in-depth learning.
It is within the Formation Axis called “Planning and Public Policies” that the specificities of the course is highlighted and where the Workshops in Public Policies belong to. The educational project of the course asserts that this axis should develop in students: “the practical abilities regarding the training in planning and managing public policy such as formulating government plans, projects, programs, reports, reviews, [to carry out] surveying, analyses, diagnosis of the situation/diagnosis tools etc.” (Educational Project of the course, 2009, emphasis added).
The Workshop in Public Policies innovates in the sense that is a practical activity where students develop at least one product throughout the academic term. The practical classes in these workshops are intercalated with instrumental short classes, called “theoretically–instrumental classes”, which aims to present concepts, discussions or basic tools that will help students to deliver the final product during the term. Another activity in these workshops that is seen as central as to give students a “real world” sense of public policy in practice is to invite/the invitation of professionals in the subject area being studied (ranging from public servants working in various bureaucratic apparatus to NGOs leaders or policy advocates and also politicians) to talk about the practical side of managing public policies.
There are six workshops in Public Policy throughout the course, one per term, numbered I to VI. Each workshop has a total of 120 hours classes per term and it is the only subject/activity that is compulsory in the whole course. The six workshops represent approximately 30% of the total hours in the course.
Let us illustrate the operation of these Workshops with some examples
The Workshop in Public Policy I deals with the issue of government agenda formation, that is, the identification of public problems and the filtering process into the governmental agenda. In this workshop, students first discuss and choose a social problem that they find should be a priority concern, study this problem, identify the policy alternatives, and propose, as the final product, a public policy to solve the problem. Workshop in Public Policy IV, on the other hand, produces participative diagnostics of the situation, incorporating – as the name suggests – popular hearings from either direct collection of data or use of secondary data. Workshop VI deals with the evaluation of public policies and students produce, at the end of the term, the actual evaluation of a policy.
All workshops share the following common characteristics:
all work is developed in groups – in this case, learning to develop cooperation among individuals of the same group is seen as part of a learning skill to real world policy-making; the use of a Lab with computers for data collection and analyses and also some notebooks; in order to support groups’ decisions in each class (average of 50 students in each class or between five and six groups) the Workshops count with two professors in the classroom besides training-into-teaching voluntary students from the Masters Program and sometimes undergraduate monitors.
The experience for the last five years shows that the Workshops are a great moment to explore the impressions students have about the world of public policies before they have to face with a complex reality containing much more constraints. The general evaluation is that students do grasp practical ideas of policy-making and are able to apply into practice some of the tools they have learnt throughout the workshops, which can be clearly observed in the case of students who have worked in different local government departments. A final evaluation worth registering is the development of working in groups-skills, which students rapidly learn and is seen as a crucial ability for future public policy managers.
New teaching-learning practice 2: The case of the residency in public policy
The Public Policy Management undergraduate course at the University of Brasilia introduced in their pedagogical proposal an innovative nature of activity that refers to experiencing an immersion in public policy, called “Residency in Public Policy”. This pedagogical strategy aims to produce a dialogue between the course and related entities, as the proposal of the course assumes this interaction and has in public organizations and civil society a permanent laboratory for learning and also intervention (Pires et al., 2014). It is worth noting that this undergraduate course, similarly to the UFRN course presented in section 2.1, was also the result of the incentives of the REUNI national Program and received the first group of students in 2009.
As Brasilia is the capital of Brazil, there are plenty of potential opportunities for students of Public Policy to interact with the reality of policy-making and management. In fact, the vast majority of the institutions that students in the immersion Residency activity have developed their projects up to know is government agencies, such as the Ministry of Education or the Ministry of Sports, although there has been also civil society institutions such as the Recycling Cooperative in Brasilia.
Regarding the operations of the activity Residency in public policy, there is a team of professors responsible to contact the organizations and entities that might be interested in receiving students for the residency experience. In fact, it is normally the other way around: these organizations contact the course as they want this kind of opportunity. There is a specific coordinator who deals with the organizations and prepares students for the immersion itself. What is required from the organization is to create an environment conducive to learning and to make available an employee to accompany the students during the 45 hours they will remain in the organization.
Before immersion itself, students attend two preparatory disciplines: research methods and techniques applied to the management of public policies; and research project development. During the project building, students choose a professor to tutor them, both in the preparation as well as in the execution of the research project.
Before starting the immersion there is a meeting between the organization’s staff and professors to complete and adjust the details before the student starts the immersion work. This careful process is designed to provide the student with an environment conducive to understanding the complexity of stages involving public policies. During the student’s permanence in the organization, they participate in meetings, assist in the preparation of reports, opinions and other activities.
After finishing the immersion, they write a report and the coordinators of the activity invite students and professors to a public session in which the students share the results of their experiences.
This pedagogical practice is still in initial stage at the moment, and it still needs to be enhanced to effectively achieve this learning environment and to become a new learning model.
There are still several challenges to be faced. For example, the desire to expand the student’s length of stay in the organization, to expand the forms of funding for students so they can go to other cities and, thus, being able to remain fully immersed in the chosen public policy area.
Although it is still an initial experiment, the results so far are encouraging, students demonstrate a strong academic background in their final reports and recognize that public policies are a way of building and strengthening democratic values and social inclusion.
Final remarks and notes on current challenges
In this article, we have attempted to show the reasons for and the main educational objectives of a new and emerging significant number of undergraduate courses in Brazil that are exclusively dedicated to public policy or public administration.
Concerning the historical-institutional context, we argued that the change in the expected role of the Brazilian State since the enactment of the 1988 democratic constitution explains the growing interest in academic research in public policy over the last 25 years. Regarding specifically the rapid and recent expansion of undergraduate courses since 2008 which are strongly connected with a national law (REUNI in Portuguese) that created strong incentives for federal Universities to expand enrolments by either expanding current courses or creating new one. The cases of undergraduate courses in public administration but specially public policy and related fields seem to us as the result of a demand that already existed but that had to wait for the “window of opportunity” that REUNI opened to propose these new courses. We also discussed the subsequent need of regulating these courses and the role of an organized group of professors and coordinators from within these courses – known as the “Public Field” movement – to guarantee the distinctive characters of the field with the support of students from these courses (the FENEAP organization).
Second, we presented the main objectives of these new courses, according to preliminary, still ongoing overall evaluation of their Educational Projects. We called the attention for common denominators among them, such as: faculty members from diverse disciplinary fields (so multidisciplinarity can be taught from the beginning), subjects organized around themes focusing current affairs in Brazil and within the international (and national) literature on themes relevant to public policy and public administration studies; a generalist training in order to promote viable dialogue with different areas of knowledge; and curriculum flexibility in order to achieve both specific curriculum relevant to local or regional contexts as well as to give more freedom of subject’s choices for students, so they can either specialize in subjects outside the course or expand more generalist views. The ideal is to train a student and a professional that is able to critically think about public policy and public administration and also to propose viable alternatives to problems, monitor implementation and evaluate them, all in the public interest (as opposed to private appropriation of the public sphere).
Obviously, there are many challenges in achieving all of these ideals. Some things will work and others will not. But this is understood as an unavoidable aspect of new courses that are experimenting new things. We know of many courses that have already reviewed aspects of their curriculum, and we see this as moving in the right direction. Currently, some courses are implementing new adjustments, given that the National Curriculum Guidelines had been approved (in 2014) and must be implemented by courses before January 2016. The first students will be evaluated by the first national examination for the area in November 2015. The highest risk concerning the adaptations courses might be undergoing in order to adequate themselves to the National Guidelines is to eliminate the diversity of specific curricula, namely, maintaining flexibility or room for specific courses to also provide knowledge that may not be relevant in national terms but would be in local or regional contexts.
In terms of challenges to these courses, the main issue is getting acknowledgement from educational authorities and funding scientific agencies that public administration and public policy studies can be classified as an autonomous field and not only as a subfield of traditional areas. This achievement is meant to produce more diversity and not competing research options to produce knowledge in this field. It is still not clear how this will be done and achieved within a rigid academic system that still works in terms of “departments”. Despite the frequent discourses from different educational authorities in Brazil on the need of producing interdisciplinarity, Universities and Fomenting agencies still find very difficult to open other options beyond traditional disciplinary fields. One possible solution might be financing more thematic projects that could stimulate the gathering of researchers and students from different disciplinary fields looking all at the same issue and searching for answers and solutions (CAPES, 2014).
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank comments on a previous version of this paper during the II International Conference on Public Policy (Milan, Italy, 1–4 July 2015). The authors would also like to thank CAPES for supporting the travel costs to the Conference.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.