Amanda Wolf

I am the Associate Dean (Learning and Teaching) and Associate Professor (Teaching) in the Wellington School of Business and Government.

It is an exciting, if challenging, time for tertiary education and for the diverse learners studying business and government subjects at Te Herenga Waka.

My orientation to the WSBG’s Learning and Teaching portfolio follows a basic logic: every learner has a unique mix of inputs – knowledge, experience, ambitions, and hurdles – all of which change as their studies progress; accordingly, each learning teacher and peer-supported learning opportunity must enable learners to blend new knowledge and capabilities with their inputs and enhance those inputs in ways that they can, with the aid of reflective practice and a range of work-integrated learning experiences, transfer with confidence into post-education contexts.

As a teacher in professional programme courses in public policy, including the MPP 'capstone' course, I see my role as introducing new tools and reasoning approaches to address professional policy practitioners’ needs, as well as assisting learners to select and activate relevant knowledge, skills and experiences.

For both my substantive roles, I draw on a wide range of scholarship of teaching and learning, and methodologies for research and policy work, including case-study methodology, learning transferable lessons for policy, and the roles of ‘evidence’ and ‘experience’ in policy work. I am an expert in Q methodology and its applications in a wide range of fields. I edited the Q methodology journal, Operant Subjectivity: The International Journal of Q Methodology, from 2005 to 2013. My Q-methodology publications are available on https://www.zotero.org/amandawolfnz/publications.

My most recent roles included Academic Programme Leader for the Masters of Public Policy and Public Management, and the Executive Master of Public Administration, delivered through the Australia New Zealand School of Government (2019 to May 2024) and Member of Academic Board. Externally, I have served on the Marsden Awards Social Science Panel (2013–2016) and taught numerous short courses for public servants. Prior to arriving in New Zealand, I was a small business owner, a food policy analyst at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington DC, and a negotiation researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, outside Vienna, Austria. I have held visiting positions at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Jacobs University Bremen and the University of Birmingham’s Institute of Local Government Studies.