Student-centred pedagogies in Vietnamese higher education:

Activity theory analysis of tensions, contradictions and hybrid practices

Dr. Thanh Pham: Faculty of Education, Monash University

Prof. Peter Renshaw: School of Education, University of Queensland

Main points of the presentation

I. 3rd Generation Activity Theory

II. Context, Design Research and Findings of the Current

Investigation

Emphasis: Investigating hybrid pedagogical practices that emerged due to tensions and contradictions during the collaborative design and evaluation of student-centred pedagogies at a Vietnamese University.

The 3rd Generation Activity Theory

• Developed by Engestrom (2001)

• Takes into consideration of the integration of the socio-institutional

infrastructure of the activity – that is, the rules, the division of labour,

and elements of the community as well as diversity and dialogue

between cultures (Engestrom, 1999)

• Focuses on understanding contradictions and tensions (from diversity

of human cultures) among participants in the community and how to

use these tensions and contradictions to bring about innovations

and/or hybrid practices.

The 3rd Generation Model

Activity system 2 

Mediating artefacts

Subject

Object 1

Division of labour

Rules 1 Community

Mediating artefacts

Object 2 Subject

Rules 2 Division of labour

Community

Hybrid/transformed practices

Activity system 1

Gap

Contradictions

Purposes of the Present Study

Use the 3rd Generation Activity Theory as a framework to explore how student-centred pedagogies were adopted and modified in Vietnamese higher education classrooms under the impact of local culture and institutional constraints.

Background

In 1980 – 1990s students from Asia were perceived by western academics as lacking critical and creative problem solving skills;

Within the current knowledge economy policy discourse, critical and creative skills are now the focus of educational reforms in Asia.

Such skills are associated with moving away from teacher-dominated instruction towards a student-centred and participatory pedagogy.

University teaching policies in Vietnam are requiring a shift to more student-centred pedagogies

• College Lecturers: Experienced, Novice and Hybrid

• 150 students from a class in a Vietnamese university

• Thanh Pham had experience across countries, was the expert researcher, collaborative designer of pedagogy, and younger Vietnamese colleague.

• Relationships and influence within the design team changed across time and different identities were foregrounded .

• Peter Renshaw was dialogic research partner advisor and co-writer with Thanh Pham.

Participants

Research Method

• Apply design-based research

• Design research can be summarised as an approach to educational research that regards theory as fundamental to understanding and improving practice in local contexts.

• It foregrounds consideration of local unique contexts and treats the change process, not as a technical challenge but as a central part of the research process that needs to be investigated collaboratively with participants through cycles of planning, implementation, collection of evidence and revision.

• Design Research complements Activity Theory because both address educational change as a complex multi-dimensional process that needs to be investigated thoroughly in local contexts.

Data Collected in the Design Process

(1) Mid-term and final assignments: Results were compared to see whether the students made any improvement on their performance.

(2) Audiotapes: The teachers were audiotaped three times during each term. This aimed to identify how the teachers interacted with the students during the lessons.

(3) Online discussion analysis: Discussion of the students on one lesson in each term was analyzed. This aimed to identify how the students and teachers interacted with and scaffolded each other on the ideas posted on the forum.

(4) Interviews: The teachers and ten students in each class were interviewed at the end of each term to ask for their perceptions about how effective teaching and learning practices employed.

(5) Researcher Journal: The researcher, Thanh Pham, kept a research journal of the process of collaborative design summarising conversations and events within the design team.

All lessons were designed in a seminar format with main steps:

Before each lesson the students were given several relevant journal articles.

The students read prior to each class.

In class, the students discussed the articles in 4-5 member groups.

The teachers posted more general questions to the class and the whole class were involved in discussing to make the points clear.

The teachers encouraged the students to post and discuss any question that they might have on an online forum.

Procedures

First cycle of planning

Main student-centred pedagogical practices embedded were …

• The lecturers were supported to apply constructivist ideas to their teaching (e.g., seeing the students as co-creators in the learning process and taking the students’ feedback and suggestions into consideration, provide written and oral feedback as much as they could)

• Maximize group work: Using group discussion in all lessons whenever possible

• Maximize peer teaching: The lecturers didn’t explain the readings but the students had to use a “questioning formulation strategy” to gauge each other’s understanding.

• Maximize independent learning: The students were encouraged to expand readings, then share and discuss any inquiry they might have in the class and on an online forum.

Evaluating the First Planning Cycle

Data obtained from all data sources (interviews, observations and online discussion analysis) in Term 1 reported that the lessons in Term 1 were unsatisfactory because …

• The students could not understand the key ideas of each weekly topic clearly. Many of them did not understand the theoretical ideas underpinning each article and how they were connected to those conceptual ideas of each weekly lecture.

• The students formulated low-level factual questions for each other rather than higher level analytical and evaluative questions.

• The students did not perform well on the first assignment (detailed in later slides).

• The students were unhappy with the small group format and how they

were placed in groups.

Tensions and contradictions emerged

For students • did not like being assigned to groups with non-friends.

• resisted contributing to group discussions

• anxious about doing well on examinations

For lecturers• were not convinced that the students could independently

identify the main points or extract the key concepts.

• first term assignments less quality than previously.

The experienced lecturer • had a strong and positive reputation to uphold with

colleagues, so she asserted her influence in the second term.

Second Planning Cycle

1. Incorporate lecture section as part of each workshop to help the students understand basic conceptual knowledge

2. Provide more scaffolding and detailed guidance to direct and support the students to investigate what was not in the texts.

• Instead of letting the students work out their own questions, the guided reciprocal peer questioning format originally developed by King (2002) was deployed with such sample questions as “How would you use … to …? Explain why …? What is the difference between … and …?”

• Each lecturer also became more involved in scaffolding online discussions by posting questions and elaborating ideas.

So, the initial seminar-style lessons were now replaced by a hybrid form of student-centred pedagogy.

Second Cycle included the following steps :

Step 1: Identify ‘knowledge points’ of each lessons and spend at least 15 minutes explaining them clearly at the beginning of each lesson.

Step 2: Group the students in 5-member groups to work on the articles: summarize key ideas of each article to make sure all members understand, then use hybrid questioning formulation strategy to gauge each other’s deep understanding. Instead of discussing verbally, the students needed to write down key ideas and keep them as the record of their thinking.

Step 3: On the online discussion forum, the students were regulated to write and respond to their classmates’ ideas when they were posted, each group did at least one posting (the group leaders arranged this).

Step 4: The teachers continued to deepen student understanding and improve their work by asking the students to take turn to summarize highlighted themes emerging in each week's online discussion (one or two students did this each week). These students then presented the key points in the

following class. This aimed to help the students to identify and synthesize different viewpoints.

There was improvement on the students' academic performance on the final assignment.

There was a significant difference on the two assignments suggesting that the students improved on their final assignment.

Assignments t p

Mid-term assignmentM (SD)

Final assignmentM (SD)

6.8(0.92) 7.3(1.12) 1.01 .03

The lecturers’ guidance and direction

• Both the lecturers and students acknowledged the importance of the lecturers’ guidance and direction in helping the students understand knowledge points.

• Note: The lecturers did not simply lecture and tell the students what to do but provided more scaffolding and mediation to help the students to approach higher-order knowledge.

• When analyzing the lecturers’ verbal behaviours in Term 2 (compared to Term 1 ) there was an doubling of “Extending the activities” and "Mediating learning”, and a decrease in “Demonstrating control”.

Table 2: The lecturers’ verbal behaviours in Term 1 & 2

Lecturers’ verbal behaviours Term 1 Term 2

1. Demonstrating control 22 18

2. Extending the activities 15 32

4. Mediating learning 18 35

Improvement in the students' higher-order verbal interactions

• Two discussions on the forum (one in each term) were coded and the results show that in Term 2 the students’ verbal interactions shifted towards more high level forms such as analyse, evaluate and create.

Table 3. Frequency of the students' verbal interactions in Term 1 & 2

Knowledge dimensions

Term 1 Term 2

Frequency & Percentage Frequency & Percentage

Low level

(Remember, Understand, Apply)

66(64.7%) 79(59.4%)

High level

(Analyze, Evaluate, Create)

36(35.3%) 54(40.6%)

Discussion

Local constraints appeared to be a very powerful force driving how the participants accepted the reform.

• The lecturers and students were interested in the reform but their goals were more multileveled and complex.

• The most important constraint determining how they should adopt the reform was the examination culture. The findings in the study showed that in Term 2 both the lecturers and students tried to modify student-centred practices in a way that could help prepare the students to succeed in exams.

• This coincides with findings of previous studies, e.g., Li (2009) found that formal learning in Asian countries is predominantly dictated by the examination system, regardless of the social or political system of the country;

• Pham and Renshaw (2014) found that Vietnamese teachers and students will support reform of teaching and learning practices if opportunities for improving examination results are at the forefront. If the reforms are not closely aligned with examinations, both teachers and students are somewhat resistant to change.

What was the hybrid student-centred pedagogy?

Although the lecturers were concerned with guiding and scaffolding the students, they did also promote independent learning in the groups and online forums and reduced their role as the sole knowledge-provider.

Lecturers applied various direct strategies to engage the students in helping each other.

Lecturers intervened particularly in scaffolding the students' complex knowledge.

This show that the lecturers paid a great deal of importance to the careful planning of the scaffolding to be provided to students, on the basis of a deep understanding of the subject matter.

• The Vietnamese teachers designed their environments using highly-structured approaches that taught the students how to learn to approach complex knowledge, then eventually the students succeeded in gaining this type of knowledge more than when they were left to be completely independent learners. This was an evidence showing that the teachers transformed the pedagogy to meet contextual demands.

• This paper shows that borrowed pedagogical practices require cultural translation and local adaptation to become part of the repertoire of teachers and students in Vietnamese colleges.

• The data for this study reflected real-world scenarios and produced practical strategies that were negotiated with teachers and students and were shown to improve engagement and learning.

References

Chen, G-M., 2001, ‘Toward transcultural understanding: A harmony theory of Chinese communication’, in Milhouse, V. H. Asante, M. K., & Nwosu, P. O. (Eds.), Transcultural realities: Interdisciplinary perspectives on cross-cultural relations (Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage Publications).

Cohen, G. E., 1994, ‘Restructuring the classroom: Conditions for productive small groups’, Review of Educational Research, 64(1), pp. 1-35.

Cole, M., Engestrom, Y. & Vasquez, O. A., 1997, Mind, Culture and Activity: Seminal papers from the laboratory of comparative human cognition (New York, Cambridge University Press).

Confucius, 1947, ‘The wisdom of Confucius’, in Commins, S., & Linscott, R. N. (Eds.), Man and man: The social philosophers (New York: Random House, Original work published ca. 479 B.C.E.)

Engestrom, Y., 1993, ‘Developmental studies of work as a testbench of activity theory: The case of primary care medical practice’, in Chaiklin, S. , & Lave, J. (Eds.), Understanding practice: Perspectives on activity and context (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).

Fjeld, K., Lauche, M., Bichsel, F., Voorhorst, H., Krueger, H., & Rauterberg, M., 2002, ‘Physical and Virtual Tools: Activity Theory Applied to the Design of Groupware’, in Nardi, B. A., & Redmiles, D. F. (Eds.), A Special Issue of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW): Activity Theory and the practice of design , 11(1-2): 153-180.

Francis, B. & Archer, L., 2005, ‘British-Chinese pupils’ and parents’ constructions of the value of education’, British Educational Research Journal, 31(1), pp. 89-108.

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