Abstract:
There is renewed interest among policy-makers in Asian countries in student-centred pedagogies both with regard to schooling systems and the university sector. The focus on student-centred pedagogies in Asian countries coincides with economic policies designed to shift the economy from reliance solely on labour-intensive and large-scale forms of industrial production to knowledge-based forms of employment where innovation and problem-solving are key requirements of employees. However, bringing about change in pedagogical practices in Asian classrooms is not a simple technical issue of introducing different teaching, learning and assessment tools. Rather, it is a more fundamental issue concerned with deeply held cultural values as student-centred pedagogy is claimed to have disparities with the socio-cultural context of Asian countries. However, recently Asian countries have been able to adopt various pedagogical reform agendas, such as cooperative learning, enquiry learning and problem-based learning. There has been debate about the efficacy of simply grafting these Western educational approaches onto established traditions of learning and teaching. Recently, researchers have proposed that reforms must be grounded in educational traditions and philosophies and in the situated experience of teachers. In another word, they advocated for the ‘middle ground’ in order to deal with mismatches and conflicts when East meets West. This middle ground can be regarded as a ‘third space’ or a ‘boundary zone’ as described by activity theorists. This one-semester study aimed to use the ‘third space’, as the core of the third generation of activity theory, as a frame to capture how a group of Vietnamese college teachers and students took into account both traditional practices and contemporary influences to transform student-centred practices to make them feasible in their classrooms. Participants were 2 lecturers and 180 students from two college classes in Vietnam. The results showed that Vietnamese students’ conceptions of learning were heavily influenced by examinations and their traditional learning culture. Consequently, the teachers needed to transform the initiative to align with these features in Vietnamese classrooms. When the revisions were made, the students were evidenced to achieve a growth in learning, change their beliefs about learning and develop both self-learning and collective learning.