Critical Practitioner Inquiry in Lao PDR

Education Reforms in Lao PDR

1. Faculty of Education, National University of Laos A research and development project started at the Faculty of Education, National University of Laos, in 2004. The main objective was to build capacity at the faculty in an integrated way through curriculum development and formal upgrading of lecturers to PhD level. The curriculum development followed a Critical Practitioner Inquiry model that included contextual analysis, analysis of practice, and change efforts in parallel to the development of scholastic perspectives on and insights into aspects of the ongoing reform efforts in the country. PhD students looked into different aspects of educational reform that were introduced as new aspects introduced through donor project and the analysis continued to investigate how conceptions and practices related to these aspects were developed on the ground within teacher education. These analyses were combined with the students’ own attempts to carry out critical practitioner inquiries into their own practice as teacher educators. The focus of the research was the introduction of action research and student-centred education with specific attention to gender and ethnic aspects in education.

Contact persons Faculty of Education, National University of Laos Former PhD students: Keophouthong Bounyasone [email protected] Kongsy Chounlamany [email protected] Ngouay Keosada [email protected] Bounchanh Khounphilaponh [email protected]

Department of Education, Umeå University Coordinator: Lars Dahlström [email protected]

PhD Theses The following doctoral theses were published in April and May 2011: Kongsy Chounlamany & Bounchanh Khounphilaphanh (2011) New Methods of Teaching? Reforming Education in Lao PDR. Department of Education, Umeå University, Sweden Abstract This thesis is about the recent education reform in Laos as a global and local process. When the economy was deteriorating in Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), the so called New Economic Mechanism (NEM) was introduced and the country opened up for global donors and markets. This also had an effect on the education system. To get hold of financial support there were demands on Lao PDR to replace the previous strong centralised governing of education with more decentralised strategies. There were further demands to replace teacher-led lessons and rote learning with more student-centred classroom practices. The research questions asked in this thesis are: How are education reform and the new methods of teaching governed in policy and through the formal education organisations from ministry level to school level? How do teachers and students in teacher education respond to

1 the education reform and the new methods of teaching? What attention is put to gender and ethnic minorities in these matters? The Thesis is inspired by Gita Steiner-Khamsi’s global perspectives on education reform; consensus, conflict and culturalist perspectives. It is also based on a local understanding taking its starting point in a pragmatic approach and a mosaic epistemology and a qualitative inductive methodological approach. The empirical findings are based on 36 documents that govern the education reform, 119 individual interviews with teachers and students in social science and science at teacher education, some observations and a contextual analysis of education, gender and ethnicity in Laos. The findings show that there is a consensus with the international community about bringing education to all people in Lao PDR. However, the political understanding is in conflict between neoliberal and socialist traditions. Democratic centralism is the foundation which built the governing system in Laos; information flows up through the system and decisions down. Even though the system leaves 20 percent autonomy to teachers to develop local curricula in line with the new methods of teaching, there are yet no major signs that such curricula exist. Teacher educators and teacher students understand new methods of teaching mainly as group learning and individual learning with only small variations between the two subjects. According to current policy the goal is to improve access to education for females and ethnic minority students. The ethnic minority students regarded individual studies as difficult because of language problems. They preferred group learning because they could be supported in language issues. Females also felt supported in group learning. However, because of old gender traditions especially females from the dominating Lao Loum group also found individual learning supportive. In individual learning females got opportunities to show individual capacities without being constrained by societal norms. The thesis ends up in a pragmatic tradition where possibilities and constraints with the education reform in Lao PDR are commented on.

Keophouthong Bounyasone & Ngouay Keosada (2011) Cultivating Educational Action Research in Lao PDR – for a better future? Department of Education, Umeå University, Sweden. This thesis looks at the introduction of educational action research as part of the national education reforms in Lao PDR. National policies on education emphasise concepts such as ‘education for all’ and ‘student-centred education’ taken from the globalised education reform agenda. Action research became a tool to implement the new pedagogy of student-centred education that was labelled ‘the five-pointed star’. The thesis contributes to the field of global policy studies. It combines global and contextual aspects in order to analyse how action research travelled from policy to practice. This process was part of a Lao national education reform that developed after the introduction of the new economic mechanism, when the previous socialist planned-economy system was replaced by a globalised market-oriented system. Data were collected from national policy documents, international donor documents, instructional material, and interviews with Lao educators involved with action research in different ways. Furthermore, we carried out action research as part of our own teaching duties in Lao PDR, which were subsequently documented and analysed.

2 In this study of educational reform in Lao PDR we have found that an educational approach like action research that is introduced as part of a taken-for-granted global agenda of change, is reduced to a technical rationality and practices that resemble previous experiences. Our findings are explained from the theoretical perspectives of hidden policy ensembles and policy backlashes. Hidden policy ensembles reduce action research to a technical rationality due to their alien cultural and social connections that are not brought into the open at the reform arena. Policy backlashes become a way for practitioners to create meaning based on previous contextual practices, conceptions, and discourses as a consequence of the technical rationality created by the hidden policy ensembles and the use of the cascade model. The thesis concludes with an outline of a possible future educational development in the form of a critical and educative action research network in Lao PDR that is inspired by cross- cultural dialogue, a critical pedagogy of place, and our own action research experiences. Colloquium on Curriculum Development for a Masters course in Education Policy, FOE, NUOL, 2011 When the four students from the Faculty of Education, FOE, at NUOL, Vientiane, Lao PDR finished their studies at the Department of Education, Umeå University, they took up duties at their faculty in Lao PDR. Amongst their duties were to develop and to be responsible for a Masters course in Education Policy. The Education Policy Masters would supplement the two previous Masters courses focusing on Education Instruction and Education Management and thereby cover the main areas of education identified as policy, management, and instruction. The Education Policy Masters was meant to build on the two thesis produced by the Lao PhD graduates supplemented with relevant national and international policy documents and research articles to cover the main aspects of the course content of globalisations, gender, and research approaches. The colloquium activities were organised around two events in August and November 2011 that were supposed to cover the development of a scholastic perspective presented as a position paper, eventually for all three Masters Courses at the faculty; a development of a course syllabus including course modules and related literature. The colloquium activities were also supposed to cater for the development of relevant instructional approaches. However, due to circumstances at NUOL, we were not able to develop these ideas any further and ended up in a joint effort to publish two international articles based on the two theses presented above. The intended Master course in Education Policy was not prepared and neither implemented. Participants from the Department of Education, Umeå University: Lars Dahlström and Ann- Louise Silfver. 2. Professional Master Course for teacher educators in Lao PDR This Master course was organised by National University of Laos and Stockholm University in cooperation with the Department of Education, Umea University. Associate Professor Lars Dahlstrom at the Department of Education, Umea University, acted as one out of five course tutors for the first three cohorts of students with a responsibility for one of the major study themes in the course called Education Reform and Educational Change. An outline of this theme is available at this website under “Documents”. Nine selected master theses from this course were published by Gunnar Sundgren as the editor in 2008, Exploring Teacher Education in Laos – aims, obstacles and possibilities, Stockholm University Press.

3 In addition to the published theses there were a number of interesting issues attended to by other authors like the one by Bounlom Isoutha (2006) Sending your children to school or not? – Dilemmas of poor and marginalised parents in a Lao village. An edited version of this Master thesis is available at this website under “Documents”. 3. Faculty of Law and Political Science, National University of Laos This CPI project was part of a general support project organised by the Department of Law, Umeå University, Sweden, as a Sida sponsored project to the development of Law studies in Laos. The CPI project was run as a 5 credits course, titled Introduction to Critical Practitioner Inquiry as a Method for Educational Development & Appraisal, for staff members at the Faculty of Law and Political Science. The course introduced CPI as an integrated method for pedagogical development and evaluation/appraisal of practice. The course participants developed, carried out, and appraised their own practice and published that process in individual or group reports. The reports were transformed into a collection of educational reports that will guide teachers at the faculty in their future development. The reports were also be compiled and included in a report addressed to the donor, as an example of an alternative way to evaluate pedagogical aspects of donor supported development projects.

Published report: Dahlström, Lars (2006) Appraisal of Pedagogical Aspects of Education. Project: Strengthening Legal Education at the Faculty of Law and Political Science, National University of Laos, Lao PDR.

Contact persons Faculty of Law and Political Science, National University of Laos Chief Technical Advisor: Eric Häggqvist [email protected]

Department of Education, Umeå University Coordinator: Lars Dahlström [email protected]