Teachers’ agency and the enactment of educational reform in Vietnam

Abstract

Scholars concerned with language policies (LPs) argue that globalization has brought about various political, socio-economic, and linguistic shifts that increasingly impact on teacher agency (e.g., Zhao & Baldauf, 2012). Recently, the LP literature has increasingly acknowledged the agentive role of teachers as a critical factor in implementing policy (Liddicoat & Baldauf, 2008). These and other scholars argue that teachers have the potential to exercise their transformative roles in implementing and responding to the LP changes (Menken & Garcia, 2010). However, agency has remained under-examined (Hamid, Nguyen, & Baldauf, 2013; Ramanathan & Morgan, 2007; Zhao & Baldauf, 2012) especially in developing settings like Vietnam. In the context of national English language education policy reforms in Vietnam, the need to explore teacher agency in response to the reforms to better understand the policy implementation process at the local level is critical. Using Fullan's (1993) theory on change agency, this paper examines how a group of English teachers in a remote mountainous area in Vietnam interpret, interrogate, and appropriate the current English LP. Data were collected from interviews and classroom observation of the teachers to shed light on their visions and practices in responding to the reform policy. The findings indicate that teachers are highly capable of exercising their agency as comprehensive policy implementers. They do so by resisting the poorly regulated English LPs and working towards meaningful pedagogical transformations. The study thus emphasizes the urgent need for a comprehensive understanding of teachers’ agency in LP decision-making and implementation. It also makes a contribution to explicitly theorizing the concept of teacher agency from the perspective of Fullan's theory on change agency. Lastly, the study considers implications for teachers, policy-makers, and school leaders to support the active roles of the teachers in reform implementation.

Keywords:

• teacher agency
• language policy
• Vietnam

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Dr Hoa Nguyen is a lecturer in the School of Education at the University of New South Wales. She obtained her PhD from the School of Education, The University of Queensland where Professor Richard (Dick) Baldauf worked as her PhD supervisor and mentor. She is indebted by his guidance, constant and unconditional support. No words are sufficient to describe his contribution to her academic life. Her most recent work with Dick was in the area of teachers and language planning and policy.

Dr Thuy Bui graduated from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, USA. She held a position as a visiting scholar at The University of Sydney, Australia in 2015. She is now working as a lecturer at the Vietnamese German University, Vietnam. Her main research interests include language policy and socioeconomic equity, neoliberalism and language policy, teacher agency, engaged ethnography, youth ideologies and activism, and the interconnection of globalization, language, and and multilingual education.