Using Stakeholder Input to Guide Cultural and Contextual Adaptations for a Universal School-Based Intervention

The Urban Review - Strong student–teacher relationships foster students’ social, emotional, and academic development, particularly for students from marginalized racial/ethnic groups....     

The rivalry of the French and American educational missions during the Vietnam War

From 1955 to 1975, the French and the Americans were both active in the educational field in South Vietnam, but their objectives were different. The French were concerned with preserving their influence with the Vietnamese elites and relied on the Mission Culturelle – the heir of the colonial Direction of Education – and its prestigious high schools. The Americans wanted to improve the level of education of the population and strived to reform the Vietnamese administration in order to make South Vietnam a nation strong enough to bar the advance of communism. The main operator was USAID, which coordinated and funded the activities of expert teams, and particularly of academic missions. The French deeply resented the American intrusion into what they believed to be their historical area of cultural influence, and they perceived the United States as aggressive towards them. The Americans did not oppose the French cultural presence but they did try to eliminate those parts of the French legacy – particularly the teaching methods and the administrative structures – that they considered to be obsolete and an obstacle to their reforms. The battle between those two cultural traditions was waged by their Vietnamese supporters, with long-time Francophiles on one side and US-trained educators and administrators on the other. However, this competition was partly artificial, as the French and Americans actually needed each other. Their educational missions also had to deal with the circumstances of the war in Vietnam. In the early 1970s, the French resigned themselves to the dismantling of their educational network while American reform met with substantial resistance in South Vietnamese society, which resented the Americanisation of an educational system that mixed the Confucian and the French academic traditions, as symbolised by the enduring popularity of the Baccalaureate examination that still exists today in Vietnam.     

Educating women about HIV/AIDS: some international comparisons

This paper describes current trends in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It looks at issues and strategies involved in educating women about HIV/AIDS in the context of the global pandemic, focusing particularly on Canada and Vietnam. These strategies are essential steps in preventing the spread of HIV and in caring for those who have already developed AIDS. The strategies identified include the formulation of public policy within Canada, Vietnam, and the UK which would strive to eliminate inequality and discrimination, while at the same time positioning HIV/AIDS education within a gender‐sensitive perspective. Other educational strategies include teaching women how to practise negotiated safety while understanding the power dynamics within which safer sex must occur, being sensitive to local cultures and moving away from individualistic programmes towards programmes that focus on structural inequalities.     

Development of a scale to measure economic status of students in rural vietnam

Family economic status is generally considered to be an important factor associated with students’ educational outcomes. However, to evaluate the strength of this contention, it is important to first have appropriate measures of family economic status. Measuring the economic status of Vietnamese people has been particularly difficult as the respondents have not been able to report accurately on their income. This has been compounded in rural populations, because of the relative economic homogeneity of communities. This study constructed, calibrated and validated a set of items to form a measure of economic status of students’ families in rural Vietnam.     

A revised model of e-brand equity and its application to high technology products

Given the growing importance of online social media platforms (OSM) in brand management, the authors attempt to extend the relationship between e-brand equity and repurchase intention with two mediator variables, namely visual appeal and e-preference in which willingness to pay a price premium (WPPP) serves as a moderator. Drawing on the perspective of digitalized engagement (PDE), the authors confirm the mediating effects on the e-brand equity-repurchase intention link while evidencing both positive and negative effects of WPPP on the linkage of e-brand equity and mediators. Contributions to theory, practice, and future studies are also provided.     

Subtractive Schooling and Identity: A Case Study of Ethnic Minority Students in Vietnam

This article examines the impact of subtractive schooling, including language use in education, on the identity of a group of ethnic minority students in Central Highlands of Vietnam. Drawing on semistructured interview data, a deeper look is taken into the ways in which these students identify themselves with their languages, cultures, and social relations. Findings reveal that the subtractive power of the school language and the institutional milieu profoundly influenced their identity construction by creating the conditions for (a) the devaluation of their language and cultural identity as a consequence of the invasion of their sociocultural territory by the dominant language and culture and (b) the segregation and disunity that affected their identity construction through social relations. Although subtractive schooling apparently facilitated students’ integration into the mainstream, its invisible power forced them not only to integrate but also to bear the full burden of constructing new identities to adjust to the school environment and the mainstream society.     

Middle leaders and middle leadership in schools: exploring the knowledge base (2003–2017)

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to explore the development of the knowledge base on middle leadership in schools. Since the seminal reviews conducted by Bennett a contemporary scan only of the scholarly literature on middle leaders/leadership in schools has not been undertaken. Consequently, this article looks at outputs relating to this topic by examining research papers indexed in the Web of Science and in SCOPUS between 2003 and 2017. The prime purpose of this review is to offer some reflections on the development of the empirical base on middle leadership in schools since 2003 and to highlight some of the implications for future research. The article concludes that middle leadership in schools remains an ongoing focus of research inquiry in a growing number of countries but suggests that the knowledge base would benefit from more sophisticated empirical studies and greater theoretical analysis.     

Video-stimulated recall in cross-cultural research in education: a case study in Vietnam

This paper examines incorporating video-stimulated recall (VSR) as a data collection technique in cross-cultural research. With VSR, participants are invited to watch video-recordings of particular events that they are involved in; they then recall their thoughts in relation to their observations of their behaviour in relation to the event. The research draws on a larger Ph.D. project completed at an Australian university that explored Vietnamese lecturers’ beliefs about learner autonomy. In cross-cultural research, using the VSR technique provided significant challenges including time constraints of participants, misunderstandings of the VSR protocol and the possibility of participants’ losing face when reflecting on their teaching episodes. Adaptations to the VSR technique were required to meet the cultural challenges specific to this population, indicating a need for flexibility and awareness of the cultural context for research.     

Acute phase reactants, challenge in the near future of animal production and veterinary medicine

INTRODUCTION The systemic acute phase reaction known to occur on infection, inflammation, trauma, burns, ma- lignancies and tissue damage in general, has been studied by scientists from various disciplines. In the last decade, emphasis has been laid on application of blood tests for acute phase reactants to monitor ani-mal health in general, as well as for human patients suffering from specified classes of diseases (Gruys et al., 2005). However, basic mechanistic patterns as- sociated wit…     

Streaming and congestion control using scalable video coding based on H.264/AVC

INTRODUCTION Streaming of multimedia data over the Internet has rapidly increased in recent years. All commercial applications and most research in video streaming use conventional hybrid video coding. To adapt the data transmission rate on the server to the varying bandwidth caused by congestion in the Internet or to different available bandwidths of different clients, the simulcast solution is widely applied (Balk et al., 2003; Feamster et al., 2001; Schierl and Wiegand, 2004). A larg…