LIST OF PANELS

Historically, there has been an inseparable link between producing knowledge about public policy and producing knowledge about how to teach it. Nevertheless, those delivering policy teaching and training have continually been confronted with the challenges of reconciling ambiguities inherent to the field since its emergence. In particular, debates continue to unfold about how best to articulate teaching approaches depending on, for example, whether to place an emphasis on either academic or applied research, on approaching public policy as a specific field of knowledge or through the lens of interdisciplinary perspectives, on adopting sectoral versus theoretical perspectives, or on approaching policy as a subfield of economics or as an element of politics and government studies. Questions also persist concerning the ability of public policy teaching and training to meet the ambitions of current public sector agendas, as well as the problem-solving limits of public policy knowledge more generally. Moreover, paradoxically, even while the field of public policy becomes increasingly internationalised, and even as the number of international students in postgraduate programs continues to grow, many public policy-related teaching practices remain relatively similar across locales. Indeed, for example, no matter the language they are written in, policy textbooks are highly homogenous in terms of the examples, theories, and authors they refer to. The central question therefore remains: How can we best teach and learn public policy in an internationalized academic context? Addressing these questions is not only crucial to further institutionalizing and internationalizing Public Policy as a field of teaching and learning, but also addresses more fundamental issues concerning about the nature of the knowledge relevant to policy research and practice, about the complex relationship between knowledge for and knowledge of policy, and about the interconnections between applied and theoretical knowledge.

To address the central question of how best to teach public policy in an internationalized academic context, we are in the process of editing a Handbook of Teaching Public Policy. This book will (1) critically examines the different ways to teach and learn public policy, with clear discussion of the advantages, disadvantages, complementarities and trade-offs involved in each approach; (2) explore and discuss the best ways to teach and learn about the key theories of the policy process; (3) the best ways to teach policy research; (4) how best to teach a plurality of audiences, from undergraduate students to practitioners and the general public; and (5) how best to develop useful and effective public policy teaching in a globalized but also wildly diverse world. The panel will prioritize contributions from authors involved with the upcoming handbook but is also open to proposals from any other authors who would like to propose an original contribution on the panel theme.