Master of Public Governance (MPG) students doing leadership experiments in their own praxis: what socio-spatial spaces made available in the MPG leadership course may enable which experiments?

The paper is a self-critical conceptual analysis of the framing of our pedagogical practice regarding the use of experiments in leadership development in public management programmes. We suggest that we may need to understand... [ view full abstract ]

The paper is a self-critical conceptual analysis of the framing of our pedagogical practice regarding the use of experiments in leadership development in public management programmes.
We suggest that we may need to understand more properly the socio-spatial dynamics making experiments possible (or not possible) in the first place. What are the prerequisites we as educators and programmes must consider to enable the experiment become and to succeed as a learning experience?
In this paper we will try explore the experimental learning space as a particular socio-spatial arrangement that should be facilitated to explore our two research questions: A. what are the preconditions for the experiment to exist and become a strong pedagogical vehicle in a leadership programme and B. what kind of experiment is afforded by each arrangement?
Facilitating the professional practitioner’s learning through the design of experiments taking place in the practitioner’s own organization builds on a critical pedagogy that points to the need of including the professional practitioner’s professional experience and identity in the learning process.
In our understanding, the context of public leadership in contemporary society is often one of paradoxes, dilemmas, contradictions and ambiguities that make public leadership a complex matter.
In this paper we look at experiments as socio-spatial arrangements of disruptions and breaks with normalizing, regulating and institutionalizing forces in and across own organization. Experiments as an inventive pedagogy is about creating spaces and connections between elements otherwise not connected.
We will conceive of experiments in leadership programmes as particular socio-spatial arrangements, but we will do this by qualifying experiments with the help of three different conceptual understandings of socio-spatiality, namely the experiment as a “potential space” (Winnicott), as a “liminal space” (Turner) and as a “heterotopic space” (Foucault).
The case is the Leadership course with the Master of Public Governance (MPG) programme, University of Copenhagen and Copenhagen Business School.