Abstract
Critical insights from educational innovation research inform TESOL educators in Vietnam that pedagogical interventions should be particular to their context and environment. This paper presents a qualitative descriptive analysis of four teachers who are students in a Master of Education (TESOL) program delivered in Vietnam by within a partnership between an Australian and a Vietnamese University. The study draws on the assessed work of students in the unit Innovation which aims to encourage its students, all of whom are experienced professional educators, to identify a research problem specific to their teaching and learning environment and design a research question built around a pedagogical or curricular intervention they can ethically implement and evaluate within their workplaces. This activity, serving as both curriculum and assessment, empowers students to apply a segment of an action research cycle to their classrooms. The study presents four narratives of teacher/researchers engaged in innovation research, identifying research problems, developing topics and lines of enquiry and ultimately evaluating their projects reflectively. This pedagogical approach articulates the idea that the best people to know what innovations are required in Vietnamese educational contexts are the teachers themselves. Additionally, the findings support the use of an action research-focused pedagogy as an appropriate approach for use in TESOL programs in such developing nations as Vietnam.
Highlights
THE SCOPE OF THE RESEARCH This research occurs within the context of a 16-year collaboration in teaching and learning TESOL between a Vietnamese and an Australian university
To the testing of new pedagogical and curricular innovations, such as those used internationally in TESOL, and evaluate their value and appropriateness to the institutional and national environments where our students teach. This program is motivated by the ideas that empowering teachers in ELT contexts by enabling them to become action researchers and reflective practitioners is a key strategy in critical pedagogy (Wyatt, 2011) and English Language Teaching (ELT) education (Burns, 2010)
Reports of what happens in TESOL classrooms in Vietnam are few (Barnard & Nguyen, 2010) so studies of this nature that contribute embodied descriptions of innovation in action add to the literature on the disjuncture between rhetoric and action in Vietnamese ELT education
Summary
During the past 15 years, the program has resisted remaining a static product and has evolved to match national initiatives such as the 2020 program, institutional drives like Hanoi university’s desire to maximize its TNE opportunities, and educational motivators like the absorption of ideas from communicative language teaching (CLT) into a broader church informed by critical, post-structural, social constructivist, and sociocultural thinking which regard learners as individuals with changing investments in learning related to their desires for future imagined communities of belonging (Kanno & Norton, 2003); and more fluid identities as socially mobile national and global community members (Norton, 2000). Access to ‘English’ is a crucial motivator in terms of students’ desires for future recognition, promotion, leadership opportunities and other forms of social and cultural capital This trend is evident in recent writings on education in Vietnam, such as Johnathan D. The program involves investigation into learners’ power to act It is important, Pham (2006) maintains, “to investigate how English language teachers think the context in which they work shapes their aspirations, research practices and outcomes” In collaboration with lecturers and with their peer community, students design an initial research question, which is developed into a line of enquiry This draws on critical friends group (CFG) protocols (Vo & Nguyen, 2009). Community-based position, students design and propose an innovation that can be implemented ethically and manageably within their workplaces
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