by Public Administration
July 28th 2025
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Changing landscapes for community engaged learning in Vietnam: Exploring excitement and confusion in community-campus partnership development
Faculty member: Dr. Kevin Kecskes
Change can be both exciting and challenging. Given that higher education in Asian contexts is changing rapidly, and especially so in Vietnam where approaches in higher education are currently experiencing significant shifts, it is not surprising that actors experience both enthusiasm and challenges. Pedagogical and research approaches in Vietnam are transforming from more traditional techniques to ones that engage community members in myriad ways. The increased prevalence of powerful interactions with faculty and students in community-based, partnered settings – for the express purposes of augmenting educational outcomes, building stronger communities, and establishing community-campus partnerships for social change – can be empowering as well as destabilizing. Based on eight years of on-the-ground experiential/experimental action and research, this analysis: 1) briefly explores the history of community-campus partnership development focusing on service learning/community-engaged learning (SL/CEL) in Vietnamese higher education; and, 2) presents early findings regarding what stultifies and/ or motivates various higher education institution (HEI) and community actors in Vietnam to engage in community partnerships and SL/CEL practices. Finally, the authors provide a set of recommended actions intended to broaden, deepen, and further institutionalize SL/CEL practices in the current context of Vietnamese campuscommunity partnership development.
See the full article here: https://engagementaustralia.org.au/transform-volume-9-hong-kong-special-issue/
Tran, H & Kecskes, K (2025). Changing landscapes for community engaged learning in Vietnam: Exploring excitement and confusion in community-campus partnership development. Transform The Journal of Engaged Scholarship, 96–117.