Naomi Aoki teaches a broad range of topics related to public management, from international and interdisciplinary perspectives. She has taught courses for undergraduate and graduate degree programs, mainly at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the University of Tokyo, and for executive education programs organized by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS.
The topics she has covered in her teaching include the following; All of them are taught in the public sector contexts:
- civil service reform
- work motivation
- decision making
- leadership
- change management
- human resource management
- performance management
- ethics and values
- gender representation
- decentralization
- local innovation and diffusion
- policy process
- agenda setting and social media
- comparative administration
- politics – administrative relations
- administrative traditions
- market-oriented reforms
- disaster risk governance
- adaptive governance
- collaborative governance
- participatory governance
- open innovation / design thinking
- rationality and policy analysis
- tame versus wicked problems
- globalization of policy processes
- technology and governance
Most of Aoki’s teaching in the past decade has taken place in international settings where students (many of whom are civil and public servants) come from a variety of cultural and administrative backgrounds. (The map indicates the students’ places of origin, based on the question, “Where are you from?” It does not reflect any particular political view.)
Attuned to their differences, she aims to help them achieve mutual learning by drawing on their diversity and experiences. She aspires to promote in her students what she calls “administrative intelligence,” defined as the ability to understand how public administration works in other countries and as the ability to objectively assess from a comparative perspective how public administration in one’s own country or community works.