The meaning of doing

Abstract

Governments write us into being by compelling the public to fill in tiny boxes on forms revealing our most private information. These personal details become matters of public record. What if students thought about how writing in public administration shapes us? In the spring of 2015, my Public Administration class joined with New York City Historic Houses Trust and its LatimerNOW project a not-for-profit organization affiliated with the New York City Parks department whose goal is to reimagine the use of historic house museums, Louis Latimer House and Writing On It All (a participatory art not-for-profit exploring space and identity through writing) to learn public administration through participation in a public participatory art project. The immediate goal was for the students to use public administration theory to design, implement, participate and evaluate a one-day project. The hope was to offer a chance to practice on a real project in a safe space so that they could later use the skills once they were employed in public administration (and the stakes were higher). I engaged reflective practice to get them to move from theory to practical application, forcing them to defend and make explicit their administrative choices, thus offering a common vocabulary for critical conversations about the process and the results. In this article, I describe the experience and critically evaluate how reflective practice can add to the teaching and learning of public administration.