Abstract
Global education agendas and scholarly literature are increasingly focused on systems change in education, in part stemming from a concern around student learning. But there is less attention in the literature about cultural change, meaning the everyday narratives, norms, values, and purposes that get enacted and reshaped within education systems. This paper examines everyday cultural practices in schools and in the social arena that contribute to and inhibit efforts toward education system change in Vietnam. It examines the contested narratives, including values and purposes of schooling and goals for learning, that circulate among policymakers, principals, and teachers. The authors draw on data from their long-term engagement with the education system in Vietnam, as well as a mixed methods study of the education system over six years. We show the shared narratives as well as the contestations around learning, pointing to changes that are occurring in the Vietnamese education system. However, a key component of cultural change—a deliberative dialogue that can shift norms and practices—is insufficiently attended to amidst other technical and policy efforts.
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Notes
Our findings contained numerous quotes from interviews with teachers and principals. Our use of quotes from qualitative analysis is to emphasize participants’ perspectives on education, specific reforms, and change in beliefs and practices in the findings. Reviewers have suggested that we give some indication of the quantity of participants who voiced these ideas. In the upcoming sections, when referring to teachers and principals’ quotes in the findings, we use ‘some’ to indicate that between 30–50% of respondents, and ‘many’ to indicate that 70% or more of respondents said these main ideas.
Pseudonyms are used when discussing policymakers’ opinions in the findings.
In our work with VNIES/MOET, we saw several versions of competencies and we learned how they engaged with experts from other countries, i.e. Australia, to understand how to rethink the curriculum—and the purpose of education more broadly.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to express our gratitude to the policymakers, principals, and teachers who participated in this study, and the research team at Viện Khoa học Giáo dục Việt Nam (Vietnam Institute of Educational Sciences) who helped collect data and assisted with transcription in preparation for analysis. Our thanks also go to Dr. Bich-Hang Duong for providing feedback on the first draft of this paper.
Funding
This work was supported by Oxford Policy Management, Grant No A0268 RISE Directorate, POI 1963.
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DeJaeghere, J., Dao, V. & Nguyen, T. Education systems change: cultural beliefs and practices that support and inhibit deep learning in Vietnam. J Educ Change (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-024-09505-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-024-09505-0