Designing Accessible Lectures for Interdisciplinary Public Affairs Education: A Three-Stage Conceptual Framework

Public affairs courses often bring together students from diverse academic backgrounds who interpret concepts through different disciplinary lenses, creating challenges for traditional, lecture-centered (instructivist) teaching. This article develops an accessible lecture delivery framework, grounded in a constructivist approach, that maintains conceptual rigor while supporting student understanding in interdisciplinary classrooms. The framework includes three stages: shared conceptual instruction, disciplinary translation, and reflective integration. It is illustrated using examples from the course Managing Government Organizations to demonstrate how key concepts can be taught through structured lecture design that accommodates diverse disciplinary perspectives without changing course content. By guiding students from a shared conceptual foundation through multidisciplinary comparison to interdisciplinary integration, the framework provides a practical approach for designing more accessible lectures in public affairs education.