Complexities in teaching competencies: a longitudinal analysis of Vietnamese teachers’ sensemaking and practices

ABSTRACT

Competency-based education (CBE) has been widely adopted in various educational contexts although research discussing how CBE is implemented in local contexts and how it shifts (or not) teaching practices is limited. This study explores how Vietnamese secondary teachers made sense of general competencies and adapted their teaching towards competency development. Using a sociocultural approach to sensemaking, this study examined secondary teachers’ interpretations and teaching practices of competencies. The study used a qualitative longitudinal design that included teacher interviews and video-cued reflections of their teaching practices. The findings illustrate teachers’ ambivalence about the new curriculum competencies and how to align their practices with the CBE reform. A common pattern across all teachers was that they made sense of competencies as learning foundational knowledge and skills, in addition to developing good attitudes, character, and morality. Over the years, teachers also emphasised the real-life application of competencies towards whole-person development. This study contributes to sociocultural perspectives on teaching and the CBE literature by showing the ways in which teachers used cultural ideas and artefacts to expand and limit their meanings of competencies in practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Competency-based education
• curriculum reform
• secondary education
• teachers’ sensemaking
• teaching practices
• Vietnam

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to the teachers who participated in this study, Dr. Lan Phuong Nguyen, Dr. Minh Phuong Luong and the research team at Vietnam Institute of Educational Sciences (VNIES) who collected data and assisted with transcription in preparation for analysis. We would also like to thank the reviewers for their constructive feedback to improve our paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The idea/l of developing a well-rounded socialist person has long been reflected in Vietnam’s education policies and curricula since the early 1950s. The current ideal of well-rounded/holistic education envisions developing citizens to have knowledge, skills, well-being, and moral values necessary for future careers and citizenship (see Duong 2022).

2. The data were gathered by Vietnamese researchers who were trained in these qualitative methods. Two of the authors conducted the training and oversaw the generation of data, including conducting interviews in schools in one province. Two of the authors are also Vietnamese educators and researchers who conducted the analysis in Vietnamese; data were also translated to English, and the third author was involved in reviewing and discussing all the analyses for this paper. We acknowledge all the researchers involved in the research in our acknowledgement statement.

3. Vietnamese teachers have been familiar with the ‘KSA requirements for outcome standards’ for many years in the current curriculum.

4. the names of the participants provided in this paper are pseudonyms to protect their confidentiality.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Oxford Policy Management, grant no. A0268 RISE Directorate, POI 1963.