Welcome to Your New Job! Swedish Municipalities, Refugee Reception and Integration: A Case-Based Learning Course for Public Administration Students

It is no exaggeration to say that refugee reception and integration remain among the most pressing challenges for Swedish municipalities.  Students planning for careers in the Swedish public sector, and especially in municipalities, would benefit from learning more about these challenges to be better prepared for the labor market.  Yet, as with every degree program, course are limited, and not every societal challenge can find its way onto course syllabi.  Is there anything that can be done?

This seminar details the use of a case-based learning exercise in Communication in Public Working Life, an undergraduate Public Administration program course at University of Gothenburg.  The course familiarizes students with different public sector settings requiring varied forms of communication: internal meetings, official comments on proposed national legislation, presentations at international network meetings, and municipal use of social media to engage directly with the public.  

In this course, students complete assignments as if employed in the integration unit of the labor market division in Ovanåker, a small Swedish municipality committed to generous refugee reception and integration policies, and involved in the international network Safe Harbor. Students share findings from scholarly literature exploring municipal engagement in refugee reception with colleagues, develop critiques of government migration policy from a municipal perspective, devise project ideas for European-level funding bids focused on integration, and make use of social media to reach out to the public – in the municipality, throughout Sweden, and even internationally. In addition to course design, this seminar also presents course evaluation results, particularly how students valued an emphasis on refugee and integration issues for learning about public sector communication.