Erin L. Borry and Peter A. Jones are associate professors in the Master of Public Administration program at the University of Alabama. Through the years, they have often shared teaching tips with one another, including ways that popular culture can be used as tools in the public administration classroom. Those discussions inevitably led to Teaching Public Administration with Pop Culture with Pop Culture, published in 2025, which details ways to utilize popular culture to not only teach public administration but public service, budgeting, statistics, ethics, social equity, and transparency within government as well.
“We believe that pedagogical approaches should be revised regularly, and such revisions may require adopting new techniques and technologies,” Borry and Jones write. “As such, instructors can and should consider nontraditional methods of teaching and learning, and in our case, we find pop culture to be an exciting and rewarding way to innovate and update what and how we teach our students.”
Arguably the most relatable examples contained within Teaching Public Administration with Pop Culture involve the television comedy Parks and Recreation, which follows the antics of a fictional recreation department in the small town of Pawnee, Indiana. “Given that public servants typically play a secondary character in film and television, this show is unique in that public servants – administrators and employees of the Parks and Recreation Department – are center stage,” the co-authors explain.
By screening episodes of the series that highlight specific concepts related to the field of public administration, Erin Borry and Peter Jones have discovered that students better understand those concepts afterwards – they actually see them applied as opposed to theorized, albeit in a fictional setting. In the season three episode “Eagleton,” for instance, the nearby community of Eagleton builds a fence in a park it shares with Pawnee to keep neighboring residents from venturing onto the Eagleton side.
“Not only does this episode display governmental relations as the city’s parks representatives work to mutually resolve the issue with the fence in the park, but it also paints a picture of inequity across jurisdictions,” Erin Borry and Peter Jones explain. “Public meetings in both cities are shown in the episode, with Pawnee’s in a no-frills room full of folding chairs and Eagleton’s in a fancy building with a valet, an open bar, and crêpe station. It can serve not only to generate discussion about resource differences between jurisdictions but also other interests. What happens when the actions of one jurisdiction affect another? What impacts do spillover effects have? The episode’s public meetings also relate to the concepts of transparency and participation.”
Erin Borry uses Parks and Recreation for a formal writing assignment as well. Students are assigned specific episodes of the series and must then identify and expound on the public administration concepts that appear in the installments. The resulting papers likewise include suggestions on how the fictitious parks and recreation department could have utilized other public administration concepts to resolve issues contained in the episodes.
Parks and Recreation can also be incorporated into classroom simulations. In simplest terms, simulations are similar to role-playing games, where students are assigned specific characters and act out scenarios in real-time. “They may take on the role of a street-level bureaucrat, a department leader, or a recipient of public service, and in any of these roles, a simulation can help them understand the incentives, pressures, and internal emotional conflicts associated with different decision they must make in their roles,” Borry and Peter Jones write in Teaching Public Administration with Pop Culture.
Traditional simulations are often time consuming to prepare and require students to adopt the persona of someone unfamiliar. By using pop culture for the setting and characters, students more readily adapt to the simulation, while a television series like Parks and Recreation contains numerous scenarios that can serve as the basis for the simulation.
Teaching Public Administration with Pop Culture contains three examples of simulations based on Parks and Recreations. The first deals with the subcontracting of concession stands in Pawnee’s parks to a local company, the second relates to the potential closing of one of the city’s parks, and the third involves the ethical culture of the Pawnee Parks and Recreation Department.
In the first simulation, students are broken into groups of eight, with four portraying main characters from the show and the others random residents of Pawnee, all of whom serve on a concessions committee. Detailed information on the economic benefit of contracting the concession stands to an outside source is provided beforehand. During the actual simulation, students discover that only one bid has been received, from local company Sweetums. After twenty minutes of discussion, it is further revealed that Sweetums has been lying about the health benefits of their “Nutri-Yum” bars, adding to the ongoing debate.
The second simulation operates in a similar fashion, with deputy director Leslie Knope inviting local residents to a meeting on the potential closing of one of the city’s parks. Before class, students watch the first two episodes of Parks and Recreation – in which Knope likewise officiated over public meetings – and then critique those meetings as one of the residents in attendance. They then portray the same character during the simulation meeting.
In the third simulation, students take the role of an outside ethics consultant, watch episodes of Parks and Recreation as homework, and then write a memo about the ethical culture of Pawnee’s Parks and Recreation Department as well as suggestions on how to improve it.
While specific television shows and episodes work well in the public administration classroom, films are another matter. “Because of the time commitment a movie requires, most of the movie should be relevant to the course content,” Erin Borry and Peter Jones write. “That is, most of the movie’s themes and plot ideally should connect to concepts you are trying to reinforce. Otherwise, the time spent watching the movie many not be proportionate to the benefits the movie has for the class, and irrelevant scenes may distract from the ones related to the course.”
Even if a film is an ideal fit in a particular classroom, Teaching Public Administration with Pop Culture suggests that it be used for assignments that likewise require a greater time commitment. Erin Borry, for instance, assigns the Ben Afflick film Argo for a final paper in her transparency course. The movie is based on real world efforts by the CIA to rescue six Americans trapped in in Iran during the late 1970s by using a fake movie production company as a cover.
“Given the focus on secrecy and national security, (Argo) raises questions about how to balance those values with transparency,” Borry explains. “The events portrayed in the movie, too, as we now know about them, are an example of retrospective transparence, which is transparency after the fact, as opposed to real-time transparency, which occurs as it happens.”
In Borry’s class, students are tasked with writing a three-page paper exploring the lack of real-time transparency in Argo due to national security concerns and then explain why they either agree or disagree that it was necessary. Students are expected to cite relevant theories and concepts discussed during the course as part of their argument, along with elements from the film.
Erin Borry and Peter Jones define pop culture in broad terms, and in addition to television and film, Teaching Public Administration with Pop Culture contains chapters on documentaries and docuseries, podcasts, and social media. Regardless of the medium, however, the results are inevitably the same.
“By linking what we teach in the classroom with the pop culture that we and our students consume, we found that students were better able to understand what theories look like in practice,” Borry and Jones write in Teaching Public Administration with Pop Culture. “They also seemed better prepared to offer critique and think critically about those theories in practice, perhaps because they were more connected with – and therefore more invested in – the examples we were using. Of course, pop culture also made it fun and exciting.”
Sounds like a win-win situation for everyone involved.
Anthony Letizia