Interdisciplinary Education of Public Administration in Iran: Curriculum Planning Requirements

Abstract

By going through different definitions of public administration, we can generally consider it as: the implementing of managerial, political, and legal theories to fulfill legislative, executive, and judicial mandates for the provision of governmental regulatory and service functions. By reviewing these definitions of public administration, this article states that interdisciplinarity is an inevitable concept of public administration's education and research in each government. Scanning and analysing pioneer courses of public administration in the world, shows that scholars of this area constantly were using different ways to achieve an interdisciplinary education in this field. For achieving it's real role of governing the Islamic state, the field of public administration in Iran should pay more attention and effort to interdisciplinary education. In this regard, by looking into current situation and style of curriculum planning of this field in Iran, the requirements of interdisciplinary curriculum planning are proposed in 7 different themes as: 1) team of curriculum planning, 2) goals of curriculum planning, 3) content and combination of curriculum, 4) integration approaches, 5) learning-teaching requirements, 6) evaluation methods of academic achievement and 7) curriculum evaluating methods. Also by considering recent innovative experience of Imam Sadiq university in Iran in this area, some implications are drawn to improve this important field in the country.