Disengaged teachers in professional development activities: a case under an international cooperation project in Vietnam

• In Event: Poster session 2

Proposal

Introduction
This poster explores the responses of disengagement and resistance by Vietnamese teachers participating in professional development activities introduced by Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).
In Vietnam, the government introduced a new curriculum based on a child-centered education approach. However, problems and challenges were reported, especially in teaching and learning process (Saito, Tsukui, and Tanaka, 2007). As reported in studies based on the implementation of child-centered curriculum (Shweisfurth, 2011), it was found that in Vietnam, a tremendous gap between the goal of educational reform and teachers’ lessons in practice was observed. The teachers who embodied Socialist’s education had difficulty in interactive lessons. To tackle these challenges, JICA implemented a project which introduced activities called professional teacher meetings (PTMs) for school reform from 2006 to 2007. This approach is based on lesson study for learning community (LSLC) (Saito, Khong, & Tsukui, 2011). Saito et al. concluded that there were contradictory results of the project; while teachers’ interaction in PTMs improved, it was observed that some teachers did not actively engage in PTMs (Saito, et al., 2011).
Recently, research on teacher learning has revealed how teachers learn from lessons taught by themselves and their co-workers (Sherin & van Es, 2009). Some influential studies, such as Frederiksen, Sherin, Sipusic, & Wolfe (1998) and Nagashima (in press), developed their analytical categories of teachers’ tendencies of their classroom observation, which provide models of how teachers obtain and change their knowledge on lesson. However, these researchers tend to focus only on successful cases; little research has focused on teachers who do not change or resist changing.
This study inquiries into how these disengaged or resisting teachers participated in LSLC in Vietnam. Through this study, our goal is to explore applicability of foreign models of teacher education by qualitative analysis of the teachers’ participation in LSLC.

Methodology
We use Nagashima (in press)’s category of meanings of observing children in lesson study. Nagashima historically reviewed strands of lesson study in Japan and classified them by re-organizing according to how they observed “child” in lesson study (Nagashima, in press). In his 6 categories teachers in lesson study observe and narrate:
0) children as supplements of observation
1) children as a collective
2) specific child’s characters
3) specific child as an object of evaluation
4) specific child as a means to verify teaching plan
5) specific child as a source of the teacher’s learning
By using English-translated transcripts of teacher meetings over multiple years, we categorize teachers’ comments by the categories. The meetings were held in an elementary school in Bac Giang province in Vietnam, the pilot area of the JICA project mentioned above.

Results and Discussion
Although we are still analyzing the data, it seems that the number of disengaged or resisting teachers’ comments are quite a few, and the proceeding pattern of PDMs and interaction between teachers construct the difficulties and resistance of their participation in PTMs.

Authors

• Risa Otsu, University of Pennsylvania

• Atsushi Tsukui, International Development Center of Japan