Introduction and Foregrounding the Work: ‘New’ Players, ‘New’ Discourses, ‘New’ Practices, and “New Flavours”

Abstract

This chapter foregrounds the context of change and reform narratives in Vietnam’s higher education (HE) across the domains of policy, curriculum, research, pedagogy, practice, and society engagement, since the Communist Party introduced the Đổi Mới Reform (often referred to as the Economic or Open Door Reform) in 1986. The market-oriented socialist Vietnam has not only been going through major transformations but has also been a very space for contested ideas and practices to be tried out and (re)introduced. Within this very space, HE has been a hothouse. The chapter also offers a comprehensive review of the existing literature; and it then identifies and engages with ‘new’ players, discourses, values, practices and flavours—the ‘new’ issues, questions, observations and phenomena that require ‘new’ investigation, critiques, insights and reflections. The chapter discusses how the whole book and its contributing chapters have moved scholarship forward in ways that are beyond methodological nationalism, while arguing for the importance of being grounded in the interconnectedness of specificity, particularity, and complexity regarding Vietnam and its HE landscape. Indeed, the chapter shows how by locating HE in Vietnam in dialogues with other national contexts, the book situates the field of HE more broadly in transnational and comparative dialogues and in interconnected relations. The chapter goes on to argue Vietnam’s responses to and embracement of change and ‘newness’ are unique in certain ways. What has been going on in its HE may also well be seen as messy, chaotic, spontaneous, patchy, inconsistent, and incoherent, yet refreshing, evolving, innovative, and aspirational at the same time. This very same situation may also be read as offering Vietnam opportunities for comprehensive transformations and for repositioning itself as a significant new player in the global HE landscape. All in all, the chapter makes a case for the merit of the book in terms of: the content it covers; the conceptual and theoretical discussion it offers; the agenda and phenomena it identifies, examines and critiques; the approach it adopts; the wide range of contexts and settings it addresses; and the diversity of the contributing authors’ educational, experiential, and academic backgrounds as well as their exposures to a wide variety of global educational systems.