آموزش روابط عمومی برون سپاری : درس هایی از نوآوری، قراردادهای آتی مدیریت، و مشارکت ذینفعان

In this article, we advocate for innovation in public relations pedagogy by importing ideas and practices from four areas. The first area involves work on disruptive technology and education that applies lessons from Silicon Valley innovations to high school education. The second area considers how knowledge management and project management findings confirm the value of teaching as the cocreation of knowledge. The third draws parallels between the challenges of moving from traditional to future management and moving from traditional to future education. All three areas offer models for innovation by adopting a more improvisational, experimental, and risk-taking ethos in education. In the fourth area, we shift from theoretical advocacy to look at how these innovations feed into an example of public relations pedagogy as co-created stakeholder participation.

Context is not simply a passive surrounding but an interwoven co-creator of meaning. Accordingly, rather than seeking to establish that public relations pedagogy is largely out of date by a focus on the past, we frame this article around potential gains in importing ideas from other areas. One of the most radical recent proposals for educational innovation is Christensen, Johnson, and Horn's (2010)Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. It offers a bleak analysis of the U.S. high school system as a preface to proposing transformational possibilities. The book partners two practitioner–theorists from education with Clay Christensen, a Silicon Valley veteran acknowledged as one of the world's leading thinkers on disruptive technologies. Christensen et al. (2010) start where considerations of pedagogy ought to start – with a discussion of purpose – and they set out four aspirations. The first is “maximize human potential” (Christensen et al., 2010, p. 1). Unfortunately, in our field this is usually diminished in defining public relations as some form of “leadership and management function” (Lattimore, Baskin, Heiman, Toth, & Van Leuven, 2009, p. 4). That establishes early that public relations is primarily concerned with maximizing some areas rather than all areas. Broader individual and social aspects come, if at all, later and in a significantly scaled-down form. Christensen et al.’s (2010) second educational purpose is facilitating “a vibrant, participative democracy in which we have an informed electorate that is capable of not being ‘spun’ by self interested leaders” (p. 1). Given the close association of public relations with “spin,” it is hard not to interpret this as implying that better education would counteract negative social impacts from public relations. We advocate acknowledging the field's social stigma up front and explicitly turning our ambition to countering that negative view and seeking a more aspirational purpose in line with maximizing human potential. It would certainly be easier to disrupt the almost taken-for-granted assumption that most public relations is corporate public relations. It opens up opportunities for a reconstituting and repurposing of the whole field.

This co-creation architecture has been successfully applied to three postgraduate student cohorts. While the first two comprised of experienced managers, the most recent group was made up of young executives starting their in-house communication careers. In the latest case other stakeholders, such as the employer, had a greater input on the program's core content at the beginning of the process. This was due to the students’ limited practical and theoretical knowledge in the field. As the program progressed, the students’ role in shaping the content did increase, particularly in the master class phase. This experience suggests how the model, or at least elements of it, can be applied to a range of students. Indeed, in areas such as social media and youth engagement, a co-creation mindset to course design could invigorate undergraduate curricula. The co-creation journey does, however, require both students and academics to make a leap of faith and to accept that some elements of the program will be more successful than others. The process also needs firm governance to ensure a range of stakeholder views are addressed and assimilated into the program. A robust, on-going debate about what should be included in a PR program is in itself an educational process for all concerned.