Vietnam: Activities Targeting Marginalized Women’s Groups for Gender Equality and Development

Abstract The Vietnamese Women’s Museum (VWM) opened in 1995 with the mission to improve public knowledge of the historical and cultural heritage of Vietnamese women in the nation’s 54 ethnic community groups. The VWM aimed to be a center for cultural exchange with women from other nations with the goal of fostering “equality, development, and peace.” At the outset it honored the positive role played by women in general, and presented some typical individuals acclaimed for their contributions and sacrifices. After some visitor research, the museum is now using a gender‐specific approach, playing the role of social critic, reflecting contemporary life, and targeting marginalized women groups.     

A systematic review and Bayesian meta-analysis of the development of turn taking in adult–child vocal interactions

Fluent conversation requires temporal organization between conversational exchanges. By performing a systematic review and Bayesian multi-level meta-analysis, we map the trajectory of infants’ turn-taking abilities over the course of early development (0 to 70 months). We synthesize the evidence from 26 studies (78 estimates from 429 unique infants, of which at least 152 are female) reporting response latencies in infant–adult dyadic interactions. The data were collected between 1975 and 2019, exclusively in North America and Europe. Infants took on average circa 1 s to respond, and the evidence of changes in response over time was inconclusive. Infants’ response latencies are related to those of their adult conversational partners: an increase of 1 s in adult response latency (e.g., 400 to 1400 ms) would be related to an increase of over 1 s in infant response latency (from 600 to 1857 ms). These results highlight the dynamic reciprocity involved in the temporal organization of turn-taking. Based on these results, we provide recommendations for future avenues of enquiry: studies should analyze how turn-by-turn exchanges develop on a longitudinal timescale, with rich assessment of infants’ linguistic and social development.     

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.     

Increasing Educational Attainment and Aspiration in an Underserved Community: The Perspective of Urban-Community Leaders

Latino students are significantly underrepresented in higher education. As the largest and fastest growing racial/ethnic population in the US, this is cause for national concern. Additionally, this rapid population growth is a call for community and school leaders from underserved communities to assess their service areas and focus on interventions to increase the college-going rates of youth. Maywood is a city located in Southeast Los Angeles. Like many other urban areas, Maywood’s largely Latino population is underrepresented in higher education. This research focused on interviewing Maywood’s community and school leaders (n = 24) to gain insight into their perceptions of their role and responsibility to address issues surrounding their community’s low levels of educational attainment. A key theme emerged revealing that leaders understand their community’s educational issues but do not see their role as leaders to directly address this issue to build a college-going culture. Implications for practice in strengthening community partnerships and developing a college-going culture are provided and a series of recommendations for the creation of a college-going culture are discussed.     

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.     

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....     

Developing Food Science Core Competencies in Vietnam: The Role of Experience and Problem Solving in an Industry‐Based Undergraduate Research Course

Although many educators now recognize the value of problem‐based learning and experiential learning, undergraduate‐level food science courses that reflect these pedagogical approaches are still relatively novel, especially in East and Southeast Asia. Leveraging existing partnerships with farmers in Vietnam, a food science course for students at Nong Lam Univ. was designed and taught. The aim was to give students the opportunity to work in small groups and conduct evidence‐based research with farmers, apply food science principles, and develop Success Skills, including the ability to think critically and communicate clearly. Drawing on the experience of 2 student groups, this exploratory study describes what students learned from the process of conducting research. In one group, students learned to work through and resolve the challenge of initial disagreement and misunderstanding with farmers and ultimately carried out a project that aligned with the students’ research interests and farmers’ needs. Another group of students learned to consider the financial limitations of farmers when attempting to develop solutions for problems and ultimately worked with farmers to address a different problem that was less financially taxing. It is important to note the challenges of planning and teaching a course in which instructors are not able to predict exactly what students will learn or experience. This is largely dependent on each student's prior knowledge, experiences, and interests; yet this study demonstrates the transformative potential of teaching a research‐based food science course that gives students authentic opportunities to identify and address real‐world challenges.     

Introducing a tool to gauge curriculum quality under Sustainable Development Goal 4: The case of primary schools in Vietnam

International Review of Education - The purposes of the study presented in this article were twofold. One was to respond to the question: what makes a quality curriculum? within the framework of...     

State–press relations revisited: a case study on how American media portray the post-war Vietnam

This study revisited the state–press relations theory by analyzing the coverage of Vietnam over the 30 years between 1980 and 2009 in two leading American news magazines, Time and Newsweek . A contribution of this research is its context of the long-term and volatile relationship between these two countries. Despite progress in the diplomatic relations between the United States and Vietnam, the portrayal of Vietnam in US media remained unchanged. This finding indicates that American media do not always support the US government's political stance when covering international news. It suggests a new direction for future research applying this theory.