Learning to Listen: Children's Voices Guiding Change in Rural Vietnam

• Author / Creator

  Maideen, Freda T

• Although Vietnam has made notable progress in terms of economic development, the transition from a social to market-based economy has exacerbated education accessibility and availability for individuals who are living in poverty. In efforts to unearth the educational experiences and views of children who are affected by poverty, this study was conducted in Quang Nam province in Central Vietnam where the education of thousands of children has been inevitably affected by limited fiscal resources.
  Despite the plethora of research on child poverty, only a small selection of this body of research focuses on the effects of living in poverty on education from the experiences and perspective of the child, and an even fewer amount of the research concentrates on the child’s experiences and views within a rural Vietnamese context, where child poverty remains a pervasive issue. Therefore, an integral goal of this qualitative study is to analyze educational issues through the lens of the child by using constructivist and interpretivist approaches.
  The results of this study demonstrated that children had pertinent suggestions for education improvement as they were given opportunities to exercise their agency. The children in this study proved to be valuable sources of knowledge where insightful experiences and views regarding child labour, household educational costs, information retention, applicability of knowledge, supportive pedagogy, and child-centred learning were shared. Research findings were placed in the larger context of development discourse and post-development theory to emphasize that in order for development initiatives within the education sector to be implemented in a sustainable and meaningful manner, the most pertinent voices need to be guiding the change: the children’s voices.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Child-centred education
  • Development education
  • Rural Vietnam
  • Poverty
  • Participatory development

• Graduation date

  Fall 2013

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Education

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3110H

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.