Reading Case Studies vs. Writing Them: How to Engage Practitioner Students

摘要: This paper describes a capstone case-studies graduate course that took place at Florida Atlantic University in the spring of 1997. We argue that students' work experiences and the academic world of public administration are brought closer when students are asked to write their own case studies or stories. The proposed pedagogical approach to teaching graduate public administration case studies has the potential of linking administrative history, which students have already covered in their program, with concrete situations, which students have also already encountered in their work places. The collection of stories, written by the practitioner students, was then published as These Things Happen: Stories from the Public Sector by Chatelaine Press, 1998. The authors present the course syllabus and format, discuss the population characteristics, and present the advantages and challenges of their approach to designing and teaching a case studies course. One of the advantages is the potential for students to situate themselves within different theoretical concepts and even to develop new concepts when the available theories do not suffice. Other advantages include the abundance of contextual information when