Speaker
Description
This paper reports on a thesis study investigating professional development models for ESL teachers in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, where teaching takes place in geographically remote, ethnically diverse, and under-resourced settings. The region is characterised by multilingual realities, uneven educational access, and policy conditions that complicate both English language teaching and teacher support. Guided by PRISMA 2020, the study draws on a systematic review of research on teacher professional development in multilingual, rural, and under-resourced contexts. The review identifies recurring models, approaches, and practices in the literature and considers their relevance to the Central Highlands. The findings suggest that place fundamentally shapes teaching conditions, that policy aspirations often clash with classroom realities, and that no existing model is fully compatible with this context. Instead, the study identifies three touchstones for rethinking professional development in the region: context-responsiveness, collaboration, and job-embeddedness. The paper argues that these principles provide a more grounded basis for professional development design and discusses how they can inform feasible and sustainable professional learning for teachers working in geographically isolated, multilingual, and resource-constrained schools.
Biography
Tú Nguyễn is a Master’s student in Education at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, supported by the Manaaki New Zealand Scholarship. His research focuses on teacher professional development for English language teachers working in rural and ethnically diverse contexts. Tú is also an ESL teacher and has more than five years of experience teaching Vietnamese as a second language to diverse learners across multiple platforms. He served as a Vietnamese Teaching Assistant under the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) Program, working in a university language program in the United States, and has also led community-based initiatives for language learners, including language exchange clubs for local and expatriate communities. His research interests include teacher professional development, educational psychology, and educational equity in multilingual and rural settings. This presentation draws on findings from his systematic review of professional development literature in rural, multilingual, and disadvantaged contexts, with particular attention to their relevance and transferability to Vietnam’s ethnic minority regions.
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