Hello everybody, I’m here today to tell
you the story of curriculum development in
higher education in my country Vietnam.
One fellow research student asked me, where
is Vietnam?
You know, to many people, Vietnam is a country
of natural disaster, of jungle wars, of boat
people.
But they didn't know that Vietnam has some
long tradition of education and the first
university was made in the country nearly
a thousand years ago.
In western education, curriculum is a well-researched
topic, so what about in Vietnam.
My research involved one single case study.
That is, curriculum development in the university
of Mekong Delta.
I wanted to answer two questions.
First, what are the understandings of curriculum
in the university?
And second, what’s the process of curriculum
development there?
To know this I interviewed three groups of
participants: administrative, teachers and
students.
I used thematic analysis and document analysis
to answer the questions.
I found that people understood curriculum
in different ways.
For example, one administrator said curriculum
was a set of regulations.
Whilst some teacher believed curriculum was
the whole course.
Another teacher just gave me the unit outlines,
when being asked about curriculum.
For students, most of them thought that curriculum
is a collection of units within a course.
But the thing I loved the most is that people
used different metaphors to describe a curriculum.
Curriculum words like the back-board of a
body.
Or curriculum was compared with a tree.
Particularly curriculum was defined as a pathway
or a road with many shops available and the
student came to what they like.
The pathway is non-stop.
When tired the student can rest, they can
take a turn to change a direction or even
stop if they want.
In terms of curriculum development, the process
is hierarchical.
On the top, the ministry of education and
trending prescribe a curriculum framework.
Based on that, the university develops the
curriculum for different courses, sending
them to faculty for implementing.
You know, only senior staff and experienced
teachers were involved and students were mostly
excluded.
The issue for me then is the importance of
autonomy in curriculum development for all
the stakeholders – for the university to
be free from the government regulations, for
teachers to select teaching content and teaching
method by themselves, and for the student
to have the voices, to have some input in
the curriculum.
So my recommendation is for a participatory
model of curriculum development in which different
people are involved and all the voices are
raised and heard.
