VIII. Working Group on Degree Programmes of Publi

Frits Van Den Berg, Consultant, The Netherlands
E-mail: patom@planet.nl
György Jenei, Corvinus University Budapest, Hungary
E-mail: gyorgy.jenei@bkae.hu
László Váradi, Corvinus University Budapest, Hungary
E-mail: laszlo.varadi@bkae.hu

NISPAcee Project Manager:

Viera Wallnerova, Email: wallnerova@nispa.org

Theme 2005: “Looking back and looking ahead: priorities in the past and present for developing quality programmes within CEE institutes of higher education”

Background
This new Working Group aims to contributing to the fulfillment of one of the NISPAcee missions: improving educational programmes by assisting human capacity building and institutional development through learning from each other.

Having the most turbulent years of political and economic transition behind us that brought into being our reorganized and/or newly established PA / PP programmes (institutes, departments), we have arrived to a turning point when it is appropriate to start stock-making, consolidating our achievements, and looking ahead to identify immediate and farther steps that should be done to improve the substantive and the pedagogical components of the educational programmes.

Teachers, instructors, and persons responsible for a whole or a module of educational programme at institutions of higher education offering degree programmes in public administration / public policy are invited to join. The instrument of sharing institutional and personal successes and failures is going to be utilized in order to promote professional development. It is not the success or failure in itself that is significant from this perspective, but the route that have been taken, the obstacles that had to overcome, the factors that have been helpful or damaging. Thus papers for discussion should explicitly focus on ‘how’ in dealing with any specific issue of ‘what’.

This Working Group will operate in several ways: forum for discussion, platform for initiatives, and vehicle for co-operation. It shall become what the participants are going to create out of it by sharing their own personal and institutional experiment on the problems they face with in their everyday work of teaching and managing departments, faculties and schools.

Call for papers
Four types of paper are invited this year under the main theme “Looking back and looking ahead: past and present priorities in developing quality programmes within CEE institutes of higher education”:

1) Papers that cover key issues of past and future development of degree programmes of PA / PP education.
An ideal paper would be composed out of some of the following components, but should have a structure that links the past to the future:

stock-taking of accomplishments of the previous period focusing on what had been most difficult to achieve,
self evaluation of the present curricula and methods of teaching ( multidisciplinary, practical skills, internship design etc. ),
self assessment of resources (faculty, teaching material, infrastructure, institutional setting, domestic and international academic contacts, links with practicing professionals, etc.),
assessment of abilities of students to work independent on real problems
assessment of research activities of the faculty and the educational utilization of its results
key issues of the next steps in developing the programme

2) Papers that review the problems emerged with implementing the Bologna process in the field of PA / PP first and second cycle education
An ideal paper should focus on the core elements of Bologna requirements and the process of their implementation. Among others they can be as follows:

diversity in the domain of PA/PP
requirements of a mission and competency based accreditation
the role of competences in the quality orientation
differentiation between first (Bachelor) and second (Master) cycle education
administrative arrangement of the teaching process
programme management
faculty nucleus and qualifications

3) Papers that cover the development of a specialization or a module or a subject (course) of a PA / PP programme
An ideal paper should contain the key issues and problems of evolving a specialization/ module/ subject, such as

its relation and contribution to attaining the main objectives of the programme
mixing theoretical knowledge and analytical skills and practical skills
assessing the module / subject by the criterion of program-coherency
its relation to the fundamental knowledge areas in the programmes

4) Papers that review experiences of present or past international support projects (Tempus, Tacis, USAID, etc.)
An ideal paper should contain the assessment of the co-operation to the expectations and to the results, such as

developing new PA/PP programmes based on various Western models
making available and accessible Western public administration and policy literature to Eastern partners
developing teaching materials in which the contents are based on Western European and American ideas
fostering collaborative research programmes, including joint conference papers, articles, edited volumes, and research grants
organizing and sponsoring domestic and overseas internship programmes
developing educational resources and technologies that are accessible through libraries and computers
faculty development activities including language skills, methodological approaches, course development, and research activities
faculty and student exchanges between Eastern and Western partners