Learning from experience
| Author | Paul Frissen,Mark Van Twist,Martijn van der Steen |
| Date | 01 March 2017 |
| Published date | 01 March 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0144739416670701 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
Special Issue Article
Learning from experience:
From case-based teaching
to experience-based
learning
Martijn van der Steen
Netherlands School of Public Administration, The Netherlands
Mark Van Twist
Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Paul Frissen
Netherlands School of Public Administration, The Netherlands
Abstract
Senior-level civil servants can learn a lot from methods such as theory-lectures and case-
teaching, but there is another resource of knowledge and insight that can be utilized
more for teaching public administration: the professional experience of participants in
training programmes. This paper argues that it is possible to use the professional
experience of participants in training programmes as didactical building blocks for
training. This helps participants to overcome the divide between theory and practice,
which is a recurring theme in the debate about how to design good education pro-
grammes for seasoned practitioners that work in the continuously developing ‘real
world’ of public administration. However, apart from teaching there is yet another
possibility to utilize the practical experience of participants in executive education. To
further develop the field of public administration research it is possible to also use the
professional practice that is opened up by education programmes as a basis for research. The
classroom of public administrating training then also becomes a space for interpretative
research in public administration. Education and research are often considered worlds
apart that only come together when theory from research is taught in education. In this
paper, we present a format that intertwines education and research, by using the pro-
fessional experiences of practitioners as the building block for training and for
Corresponding author:
Martijn van der Steen, Netherlands School of Public Administration, Lange Voorhout 17, The Hague 2514EB,
The Netherlands.
Email: steen@nsob.nl
Teaching Public Administration
2017, Vol. 35(1) 105–125
ªThe Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0144739416670701
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interpretative public administration research. In doing so, this didactical format, which
we call learning atelier, turns the classroom in to a place for learning, a place of practice
and a place for research.
Keywords
Teaching public administration, participative research, interpretative research, executive
education, practice research, case study method
Introduction
‘Bring in the next case’
In a reference to education at American business schools, Mintzberg (2004) jokes about a
recent Harvard MBA graduate walking into an office for his first day at work. The
graduate comes in, sits down at his desk, and then exclaims to his secretary ‘bring in the
next case!’ The essence of this joke is that many business schools teach students to solve
teaching cases instead of preparing graduates for real work in the real world. They learn
to solve cases, not to interact and deal with the dynamics of everyday organizational life.
Students are taught to solve didactically designed cases, instead of learning to deal with
the ambiguity and ambivalence that comes with reality. Therefore, the more serious
question prompted by the joke is how means of (executive) education and training can be
developed that better reflect the messy and ambiguous social realities of life and work in
public service. Are there ways to bring the richness and ambiguity of public adminis-
tration work and practice into the public administration classroom?
The same questions about the connection to practice can be asked for public adminis-
tration research.Positivist research in public administration relies heavily on methods that
delineate people who work in practice as ‘respondents’, or even worse, as ‘data’ (Whit-
tington et al., 2003). To streamline the causal argument, contextual elements that define
reality are ‘controlled’ as a variable or placed outside of the research design entirely. The
characteristicsthat make lifein public service complicatedare left out of the model,in order
to hypothesize causal models. This leads to methodologically sound but highly simplified
accounts ofreality, which then form thebasis for discussions aboutthe profession of public
administrationand its processes (Abbott, 2004;Flyberg, 2006; Novotny et al., 2001).This
can produce good quality positivist public administration research, without the findings
being of much significance to the practitioners inside public administration.
In search of proximity to practice
In order to develop more accurate and rich accounts of practice, some researchers attempt
to move in ‘closer’ to where the work of public administration is done. That requires a
balancing of two important values: the proximity to and distance from research subjects.
Practice is often studied ex-post and through indirect methods, such as surveys, interviews
and focus groups (Flyberg, 2006; Ragin and Becker, 2005; Yin, 1994). This ensures a level
of distance of the researcher, but also diminishes the data’s bounty (Abbott, 2004; Jar-
zabkowski et al., 2007; Mantere and Vaara, 2008). Other research methods look for more
106 Teaching Public Administration 35(1)
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