Family Impact Institute Using Research to Build Better Public Policy for Families

Teaching Family Policy

This section aims to begin a dialogue about the precepts and philosophies from which good courses and high teaching evaluations are made. We are interested in adding your ideas for teaching family policy courses on college campuses to our website. Please send your contributions to:

• Shelley McDermid Wadsworth
• Purdue University
• 1200 W. State Street
• West Lafayette, IN 47907
• info@familyimpactseminars.org

• Introductory Family Policy Lecture
• Undergraduate & Graduate Syllabi
• Definitions & Dimensions
• Activities & Assignments
• Training & Internship Opportunities

If you are an instructor interested in making family policy come alive for undergraduate and graduate students, check out the third edition of Karen Bogenschneider’s book, Family Policy Matters: How Policymaking Affects Families and What Professional Can Do. This best-selling text integrates the latest research and cutting-edge practice to make an evidence-based case for family policy. It uses examples from around the globe to explain how families support society and how policies support families. The book also moves beyond analysis to action with pragmatic processes and procedures for improving the effectiveness and efficiency of policies by viewing them through the lens of family impact.

Highlights of the new edition include:

• Extensive revisions with many new references and policies that reflect recent changes in the economy, politics, and families.
• Many new learning tools including guiding questions, more tables and figures, chapter glossaries, discussion questions, and chapter summaries.
• Enhanced global perspective with a new chapter (5) that features what policies nations have put in place to strengthen and support families.
• A new chapter (8) that views how family considerations can improve the effectiveness of policy decisions on issues such as early childhood care and education, health care, juvenile crime, long-term care, parent education, and welfare reform.
• A new chapter (11) on what the policy process and policymakers are really like including how a bill becomes a law.
• A new chapter (12) that provides a theoretical and empirical rationale for viewing issues through the family impact lens and what innovative tools and procedures exist for analyzing the family impact of organizations, policies, programs, and practices.
• Several chapters that review what professionals can do in the policy arena and how they can foster compromise and common ground.

A revised instructor’s manual provides innovative teaching aides guaranteed to engage today’s digital generation:

• links to 50 video and audio footage of family policy luminaries;
• 33 family policy activities from experienced instructors;
• updated undergraduate and graduate syllabi;
• a PowerPoint, lesson plan, and discussion questions for each chapter of the third edition;
• assignments and test questions;
• instructor insights for each chapter that provide provocative questions, practical examples, and penetrating analysis; and more.

Available free to any instructor who adopts the text.

Evidence-Based Policymaking: Insights from Policy-Minded Researchers and Research-Minded Policymakers provides an insider’s view of what policymakers are like and how the policymaking process really works. Through a series of in-depth interviews with researchers, policymakers, and intermediaries who serve between the two, the authors provide insight into why researchers and policymakers do not easily interact and, when they do, why the communication is often strained. The book draws insights from some of the best and brightest informants from the research and policy communities about about how to bridge the research/policy divide. Readers will learn the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and approaches needed to take research findings from the laboratory to legislative bodies.