Teaching Regulatory Humility: Experimenting with Student Practitioners

Abstract

Donald Schön’s assertion that becoming an effective professional requires more than technical rationality underpins the pedagogy of Masters in Public Administration (MPA) programmes. This article explores how public administrators can be taught to think reflectively and reflexively about the limits of control in the context of decision making and regulatory policy appraisal. It reports on an in-class pedagogical experiment on illusions of control used to generate a real-life experience of the cognitive and emotional dimensions of control. By doing so, the article introduces the concept of ‘regulatory humility’ and contributes to the literature on experiments as pedagogical tools, and to debates on teaching methods in public administration and political science.