Recently, a very bright student of mine (current) asked me which courses I would suggest that she takes BEFORE heading into graduate school. While my department (Political Science at The University of British Columbia) has an extremely well-rounded BA degree, I’m sure my students would benefit from taking other courses that would allow them to arrive to graduate school more prepared.

Given the recent emphasis in political science and public policy in quantitative methods, I suggested to my student to take a couple of courses in basic economics: microeconomics and macroeconomics. I also suggested an additional course in statistics (although our course in statistics in political science, taught by my colleague Dr. Fred Cutler, is a very robust course). Several of my fellow colleagues in the department have very strong quantitative and formal modeling backgrounds.

On a personal level (read: my own methodological preferences) I work with mixed research methods. I have about the same degree of fluency in discourse analysis and institutional ethnography as I do in multivariate analysis. I am (obviously) a fan of geographical information systems (GIS) and thus I enjoy and encourage my students to undertake spatial analysis.

I also suggested a course in econometrics, as it will definitely be valuable (honestly, it never hurts to know econometrics). Josh Greenberg and Wendy Waters both suggested additional courses, in discourse coalitions analysis, dramaturgy, public-private partnerships and some housing policy (although in my Public Policy course I do talk about housing). Janet De Luna (a graduate student at the University of Chicago, in Public Policy) also suggested political institutions and political economy. Reema Faris suggested courses in humanities (but I’m sure they DO already take those!).

If you were to suggest courses that undergraduate students could take to arrive to graduate school in public policy better prepared, which courses would you recommend? Feel free to add in the comments section.

Second, because I believe that the theoretical and empirical lessons learned in a Public Policy Analysis course can be applicable in real life situations. So I designed my course to be an applied, theoretically-founded and empirically-informed course. My students undertake a 72 hour, under-pressure policy-analytical exercise. And they learn a lot from it.

This week I had the pleasure to host The Honorable Naomi Yamamoto, MLA for Lonsdale North Vancouver and Minister of Advanced Education of the province of British Columbia. Minister Yamamoto spent an hour guest-lecturing and interacting with my 3rd and 4th year undergraduate Political Science students. I was extremely pleased at the depth of respectful, engaged intellectual discussions my students had with Minister Yamamoto.

Theoretically-grounded and empirically-informed intellectual discourse is the foundation of good policy design. My students and Minister Yamamoto engaged in a very productive conversation on the future of Canadian and BC post-secondary education. Minister Yamamoto challenged my students to come up with the #1 barrier to access to postsecondary education, and ways to overcome these barriers.

I have conducted theoretical and applied research on policy analysis. I have also undertaken consultancy policy-analytical projects. Because of my experience both in industry, and advising governments, I firmly believe that inviting guest lecturers who are working in the actual policy field is a substantially productive exercise, and I publicly wanted to thank Minister Yamamoto for taking the time to have this conversation with my students, for helping me educate them on the challenges and opportunities for British Columbia’s post-secondary education policy and for opening the forum to an engaged, civilized conversation on something all of my students have a stake on (as well as me): their future.

One of the reasons why I ask my students in my syllabus to provide me with a photograph and a brief summary of their background and why they are taking my courses is because I am a firm believer in mentorship. I work hard at encouraging my students to grow, and if they so choose, undertake graduate studies or further their education. At some point, most of my hard-working students will come back and ask me “Dr. Pacheco-Vega, would you please write a letter of reference for me?”. And for the most part, I say yes.

Most of the students who approach me always ask me if I remember them (or hope I do). In all cases I would NEVER write a letter of reference for a student whom I don’t have a basis to support (e.g. didn’t work hard in my classes, never interacted with me, etc.) There have been a few instances where a student who really didn’t work hard in my classes has asked me for a letter of reference and I politely decline.

This short post is a quick list of things ANY professor will need if they are writing a reference letter for you, and these suggestions are geared mostly to the student.

• Make sure you actually know your professor. It’s amazing how many students don’t feel like they can interact and approach professors. All my undergraduate and graduate career I had amazing mentors and that’s also why that’s my own philosophy. I’m very approachable. You can reach me by email or Twitter or Facebook, or heck, dropping by my office hours. For a student who is seeking a letter of reference, it is important to me to know the student, and I thus suggest that you make an active effort to get to know your professors.
• Make sure you provide ALL background information. What program are you seeking to get into? What is your specialty? What did you write when you were my student? What have you been up to in the past few years that I can put into the letter of reference?
• Provide polite reminders within 4, 2 and 1 week. We are busy academics, any of your professors will have between 10 and 20 different things to attend to. Even if I insert it into my Google Calendar, it’s possible that I’ll forget. REMIND ME. And remind your professors (politely).
• Be respectful in your communication. You may no longer be my student but I will always be your professor (or ex-professor). So, be courteous, respectful and direct without being blunt
• Provide easy schematics of when you need letters of reference and for what. I ask my students to build a table telling me: name of the school, program, deadline for letter of reference, and special details.
• Tell your professor the format of the application, well in advance. University of Toronto, and London School of Economics, for example, require online applications. If that’s the case, I can treat the application differently than if I need to search my archives for any kind of work you’ve sent me
• Provide ALL contact details of EACH university you are applying to. Provide them in the table I mentioned above, and if need be, add them again in the text of an email reminder. The reality is, it takes way longer for me to write a letter if I need to be searching on Google for the contact details of each university and whom I need to address the reference letter.
• Be grateful! You don’t necessarily need to buy a gift for a professor, but a handwritten note or a thank you card goes a long way. Trust me, the amount of time we spend writing letters of reference for students is not insignificant!

In the past two years, I’ve taught a few seminars on how to use social media in academic settings. I find it extremely hard to convince scientists and professors to use social media (and I have to tell them: remember, I’m one of you, folks – not one of THEM, e.g. not one of the social media experts we find all the time). The question that I get asked the most when I give talks to professors on how to use social media is “what are your best practices on using Twitter and Facebook with your students?”

I would summarize my experience (and best practices) as follows:

• I make it a requirement for my students (e.g. I grade their performance) to participate in discussions, online or offline. Participating online means (amongst other things, but not limited to) commenting on blog posts, sharing relevant news and information on Twitter or my Facebook Page wall.
• I make it explicit to my students that a quick Twitter mention to my @raulpacheco account or a short comment on my Facebook page wall may get responded faster than using email to communicate with me. The brevity of Twitter enables them (and me) to learn how to synthesize large pieces of information in 140 character snippets.
• I follow back EVERY SINGLE ONE of my students on Twitter. There is a level of privacy that I want them to have that I understand doesn’t apply with the @ reply mention or a Facebook wall comment. If they choose to send me a quick Direct Message, I always respond through the same channel.
• I don’t add my students to my personal Facebook account, but I communicate through my Facebook page. There are various schools of thought on whether one should ‘Friend’ students or not. I find the Facebook page useful enough, because as I tell my students on my syllabus, I’m not your friend, I’m not your colleague. I’m your professor.
• I have created specific hashtags for each of my courses: Public Policy (#POLI350A) and Global Environmental Politics (#POLI375A) and Environmental Politics and Policy (#POLI351). That way, my students can track whatever information I have shared or can indicate to me something that they think I need to pay attention to.
• I share the Twitter ID of my colleagues when they are coming to a lecture. The best example is Dr. Janni Aragon from the University of Victoria, a good friend of mine who guest lectures often on topics of gender, global environmental politics and public policy in my courses. Her Twitter ID is @janniaragon, and I mention her whenever she is about to come to my class to guest-lecture. Coincidentally, we have co-presented at least once on our experiences Teaching with Social Media, this year at Social Media Camp Victoria 2011.
• I have created Twitter lists for my students, for colleagues, for research topics, and monitor these lists. In particular, I monitor my My Students’ Twitter list because that way I can keep tabs on what my former and current students are doing. It’s a great way also for my own students to build a network of friends online as they are all graduates who have taken my courses.

These are just a few of the best practices I have implemented throughout the years I’ve been teaching at the university level. Hopefully they will be useful to other colleagues seeking to implement social media (specifically Twitter and Facebook) in the classroom.

For me, the underlying philosophy of why and how I use social media in teaching & higher education is pretty much the same philosophy that underlies my teaching: I seek to inspire my students, to connect them with real policy issues that need to be tackled and thought out, to build their skills and to provide them with a platform from where to launch their careers. Enabling them to be fluent in social media and gain confidence in their social media skills is just one of the ways in which I try to strengthen my student’s experience and educational outcomes.

I find it extremely rewarding when a former student of mine shares news about their current job or scholarly activities, when they find a nice read on global environmental politics that I must check out and when they simply just indicate how my work enables them or inspires them. It’s one of the best rewards of encouraging my students to use social media.

While I use a fairly diverse variety of theoretical and analytical tools in my research, I self-identify primarily as a neo-institutional theorist. Thus, while I understand a range of feminist theories of public policy, I prefer to defer to specialists in the field like Dr. Aragon, who has kindly offered her lecture slides for my students to read, and I am posting them here as a PDF document.

Thanks to Dr. Aragon for accepting my invitation. My students were very engaged and really pleased with her visit and talk.

Scholarly work on storytelling as a device to enhance the learning experience of students has shown the value of introducing learners to storytelling techniques. Some researchers have explored the use of storytelling to advance learning in the workplace (Swap et al 2001). For those of us who have been trained in the qualitative research methods, narrative inquiry (Clandinin and Connelly 2000) is a key strategy that helps us advance our understanding of individual and collective behaviour.

Egan (1989) championed the use of storytelling as a non-mechanistic approach to teaching. It is clear to me, from the works I have reviewed while thinking about this topic, scholarly research has been and continues to be undertaken on how storytelling can be successfully in teaching contexts, and as a qualitative research strategy. It recently all “clicked” in my brain when I realized that I have been doing a lot of storytelling both in my teaching and in my research. And I wanted to pass that on to my own students.

My former doctoral supervisor, someone I profoundly respect as a scholar and as an educator, taught me always to look at data with a rigorous and analytical mind, and to tell a story around the data. He asked me to look at data and think critically and make sense of it. And that’s how I conduct research, and how I hope my own students will undertake theirs. I told my students recently that I want them to do rigorous research, empirically-grounded and theoretically-informed.

In the classroom, I tell my students stories around the topics I research and the relevance of those research projects for the advancement of our understanding of comparative environmental and public policy. And the interesting thing is, my students react very positively to storytelling. This week, I taught a class in “full low-tech mode” (e.g. without any power point nor visuals, only the chalkboard and my own voice). I drew a road map of what I wanted my students to learn and as I was drawing the pieces of the puzzle, I put them together in an overview for them to see.

Students reacted extremely well, some even to the point of commenting “dear Dr. Pacheco-Vega, I really prefer low-tech classes”. I will continue to mix technology-supported lectures with “low tech” ones, but the experience really left me pondering on how valuable storytelling can be in my own teaching, and how much of it I use in my own research.

The current list of topics is as follows

1. Overview of global environmental issues
2. Global public goods
3. From Stockholm to Johannesburg – 30 years of sustainable development
4. The global commons
5. The analytical framework for environmental policy analysis: The policy regime framework (ideas, interests, institutions)
6. Interests in environmental politics
7. Institutions in environmental politics
8. Ideas in environmental politics
9. International environmental regimes (regime theory)
10. North American environmental policy (an overview)
11. The policy process – agenda setting to evaluation
12. Agenda setting – problem definition
13. Instrument design – instrument choice
14. Implementation and evaluation
15. Environmental policy instruments: regulation
16. EPI – market-based instruments
17. EPI – information-based and voluntary instruments
18. Corporate environmental strategy and CSR
19. ISO 14000 series, etc.
20. Environmental non-governmental organization and their strategies
21. Environmental perception, attitudes, values – environmental psychology

In my notes I wrote down that I did not like putting as much emphasis on international environmental politics. Given this, I am thinking to eliminate most of the global environmental politics/international environmental politics and add subject-area topics (e.g. water policy in Canada, solid waste policy in Canada, etc.). Bear in mind that this course is primarily focused on Canadian environmental policy, and that it is mostly a methodological course (e.g. at the end of the course the student should be able to analyze environmental policy).

I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

My former PhD advisor is a very wise man and I owe a great deal of what I have accomplished to the formidable PhD training I had under his supervision. He shaped my thinking, enhanced my research skills by encouraging me and demanding from me to undertake empirical analyses. Even though my memorization capabilities and speed-reading skills have enabled me to master a broad variety of theoretical frameworks, my former PhD supervisor always wanted me to empirically test theories. Doing so gave me the best of both worlds (theory and empirics).

Throughout the course of my teaching, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, I have refined my instructional skills and summarized in a few sentences what I demand from my students: I want my students’ research to be evidence-based, empirically-grounded and theoretically sound.

As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s quote has indicated above, it is foolish to theorize before one has data. Even though much of my comparative environmental policy work has focused in the development of better theories that allow us to understand why governments at various scales choose different policy options, I have years of training in empirical research methods, both qualitative and quantitative. I have undertaken in-depth qualitative studies (interviews and institutional ethnographies) and built massive datasets that have been explored through a variety of quantitative methods (including firm demographics and multivariate analysis).

Much as my students may think I’m too demanding, I strongly believe in providing them with a strong foundation in research methods. Even if I do not teach a methods course per se, I showcase examples of studies that have both sound theoretical grounding and robust empirical research methodologies. I think that the best long-lasting learning experience I can give any student is the self-confidence of knowing how to tackle a problem using empirical research methods.

In preparing my lectures for this week (in the course POLI 375 Global Environmental Politics), I found myself at a loss. While I am well immersed in the academic literature, reading every issue of the associated journals in the discipline (Global Environmental Politics and International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics), I couldn’t find one single short piece that described to me (and obviously to my students) the state of the research agenda in environmental security.

The work of Simon Dalby, Geoff and Dave Dabelko, Thomas Homer-Dixon and a number of other scholars is focused on environmental security. And while the definitional issue seems to have been left behind in the conversation, I still find that scholars have difficulties in determining what exactly encompasses environmental security.

Recent work by Joshua Busby has focused on demonstrating the linkages between climate change and international security. This link is particularly visible because of the obvious nexus between vulnerability to climate change in nations and bad governance/past conflict. The above mentioned negative conditions have made these countries even more vulnerable. Responding to disasters thus becomes a challenge.

In my primary research field (water), the concept of water security has been at the forefront of academic discussions, but I ponder whether the field of environmental security can afford to continue to focus on “security in resource X or Y” rather than examining the inextricable linkages between environmental degradation and international security/foreign policy.

So I ponder, where is the debate going in the field of global environmental security? Is it going to continue in the two sub-fields (interconnected) of environmental refugees and climate-security? I wrote this blog entry to help set the stage for an online conversation between me, my students in the course, and potentially other research colleagues in the field. Comments, as always, appreciated.

photo credit: Latvian Foreign Ministry

Professor Eugene Bardach is, in my opinion, one of the most practical policy analysts out there. An emeritus professor at University of California Berkeley, Professor Bardach wrote a practical, widely cited, the Eightfold Path to More Effective Problem Solving: A Practical Guide to Policy Analysis. I have used his text and many of his articles not only in my research but also in my teaching (POLI 350A Public Policy).

As I prepare to teach The Comparative Politics of Public Policy (e.g. examining cross-national variations in national public policies, or at the regional level, cross-regional changes), I thought it would be a great exercise for me, for my students and for my readers to conduct a full policy analysis (national or regional level, I don’t expect to do cross-national comparisons) using Bardach’s method.

I plan to write separate blog posts for each one of the steps of Bardach’s model to help my readers (and my students) understand how policy analysis is conducted, in real life. I have been thinking for a long time as to which policies I would like to analyze. I know that the Burrard bike trial could be one, where there’s at least *some* data. I could look at the ban on water bottles at the municipal level.

So, have your say on here. Suggest policy decisions that you would like me to examine using Bardach’s model. I’ll consider all options, primarily based on the amount of information we have available. I’ll decide by early next week (the first week of November, 2009). Drop a comment on this post with your suggestions. It can be a Vancouver, Lower Mainland or Canadian issue, or an international one.