Teacher agency in times of educational policy change: A Vietnamese case study

Abstract

This thesis is a study of the manifestation and characteristics of teacher agency in response to educational policy change in a Southeast Asian setting. It is a qualitative case study based on fieldwork with tertiary-level language teachers in Vietnam. The teachers who participated in the study were required to transition from teaching French, Russian and Chinese to English due to changes that occurred in foreign language education. The study is located in the scholarly field of teacher agency, working from the perspective that teachers are the key agents in the enactment of educational policy change. The central argument of this study is that in response to educational policy enactment, teacher agency is deeply influenced by the political, social and cultural contexts in which educational changes take place. The thesis focuses on the dramatic changes brought about in tertiary-sector language teaching in Vietnam as a consequence of educational reforms and the emerging role of English as the most important foreign language. The participants in my study were 20 Vietnamese teachers of modern foreign languages, referred to in this thesis as ‘transitioned teachers’, at one of the leading universities in Vietnam. These transitioned teachers were given little option but to rapidly switch from teaching other foreign languages to English and were required to meet a proficiency benchmark introduced under the stipulations of the National Foreign Language 2020 Project. These changes had enormous implications for the transitioned teachers in their professional and personal lives. My study explores their responses to policy change and reveals the features of their agency. The notions of Figured Worlds (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998) and the subject-centred sociocultural approach (Etelapelto, Vahasantanen, Hokka, & Paloniemi, 2013) served as twin interpretive lenses for this study, which sought to understand the ways in which the transitioned teachers exercised agency in a hierarchical, top-down management system. A Figured World is a realm of interpretation that is socially and culturally constructed, and in which “particular characters and actors are recognised, significance is assigned to certain acts, and particular outcomes are valued over others” (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998, p. 52). Working with its concepts of space and improvisations, my study explored the transitioned teachers’ agency as they moved from their previous world of their first foreign language teaching to a new world of English teaching. A modified subject-centred sociocultural approach provided another useful lens to examine how sociocultural factors and the transitioned teachers’ identities shaped their responses in the enactment of educational change. Data were collected from a variety of sources: a preliminary survey, two documents, multiple-stage interviews with both transitioned teachers and faculty and university leaders, and observations of online communication, faculty meetings, and distance-teaching sessions. Qualitative thematic content analysis was used to analyse the data, which were collected in Vietnamese and translated to English. Cultural Discourse Studies (Shi-xu, 2012) was also employed to provide insights into the cultural layers of meaning and sociocultural values in the participants’ interview data. The findings show that the agency of the transitioned teachers and the ways they improvised their pathways through the transition were complex, dynamic, and culturally nuanced, circumventing rather than challenging or resisting policy over which they had little control. In a highly centralised political system, manoeuvrability and critical evaluations become important elements of agency. These features have hitherto received scant attention in the literature on teacher agency. While these findings confirm the complexities of teacher agency, they also present fresh insights into the influences of sociocultural factors and teacher identities on the exercise of agency in times of educational change. In addition to the transitioned teachers’ work history and experience, motivation and interest, goals and ideals, professional knowledge and competence, professional commitment, and professional ego, the findings show that solidarity and collectivity can be powerful elements of agency. On the personal front, cultural perceptions of family roles and responsibilities were also found to play an important role in the exercise of agency. Overall, in examining the transitioned teachers’ responses to change and the ways in which they enacted the new policy, my study contributes rich cultural perspectives on teacher agency and its manifestations. It also provides suggestions for stakeholders involved in change enactment processes, such as keeping the lines of communication open between policymakers and enactors in order to better deal with tensions and miscommunications that may arise. The findings and recommendations in my study offer lessons for those aspiring to contribute to the process of educational policy enactment in other educational contexts undergoing similar changes.