Study of Street Children in Vietnam

I would like to share some learner-centered learning approaches that were adopted in an overseas vacation module that I led in September 2007. This module involved taking a group of 12 second-year students to Vietnam for 10 days during their holiday period. The students can use this vacation module to fulfill one of the requirements for the School of Interdisciplinary Studies.

The overall aim of this vacation module was to study the phenomenon of street children in Hanoi using concepts and theories from social psychology. Street children are often subject to abuse, neglect and exploitation.

Street children in Hanoi

The vacation module consisted of 3 parts:

1. Pre-departure workshops (in Singapore) where students conducted initial research on social psychology and presented their results to the class;
2. The 10-day trip to Hanoi where they got a glimpse into the lives of street children first hand; and
3. Post-trip debrief sessions (in Singapore) where they organized their notes and conducted their final presentations.

What is Learner-Centred Learning?

These are comments that you hear from fellow lecturers during training sessions on learner-centered learning. But it is natural for most of us to regard learner-centered learning with suspicion because lectures and examinations remain the most widely used techniques in schools all around the world. In fact, this combination is so ingrained that it is synonymous with education and learning.

However, I felt it was important that the vacation module in Vietnam was conducted using learner-centred approaches. Essentially, I was following Rallis’ definition when he says that…

… learner-centred learning takes place when students participate and contribute actively to their learning, making discoveries instead of following directions or memorizing facts. Importantly, students direct their own learning and are guided by their own questioning (Rallis, 1995).

Shifting the Responsibility of Learning from Teacher to Student

The first step in enabling students to direct their own learning is to interest them in the topic of study, which in this case is the phenomenon of street children and general theories from social psychology. This is important because once students are interested it is much easier to put the student in the driver’s seat to take charge of their own learning.

The students who enroll in vacation modules are often a self-selected group, so it is possibly easier to adopt learner-centred learning approaches with them. Other than a little soft-selling on the part of the teacher, applicants are generally motivated as they would be sacrificing their vacation time and by signing up for this module, it would indicate that they like this topic of study.

For this vacation module, I allowed students autonomy to decide their assignments within certain parameters. By giving them a certain degree of choice, the students will have greater ownership of their assignments as they are guided by their interests. This also builds on their earlier motivation when signing up for the module.

However, I found that I needed to continually guide and mentor the students with regards to their assignments. This was to ensure that their self-directed learning efforts did not degenerate into frivolity.

Students recording notes in Vietnam

Structuring Module Assignments

Assignments in this module were also deliberately structured such that they build on each other. For instance, in the first assignment students researched any topic within the phenomenon of street children while the next required that they select theories from a social psychology text to lecture in class. A third assignment then required that they attempt to marry the two.

As you may have guessed, another approach I employed was to make students part of my lecture team. I assigned them manageable amounts of reading material to lead in class presentations. This allows the students to assume more responsibility by taking a share in the teaching of the class. As such, I am also able to concentrate more on posing questions on the assigned reading material as well as to ascertain their understanding.

Challenges of Learner-centered Learning Approaches

If students are doing the lecturing, then the quality of lecturing may suffer and at times less ground may be covered. Also, there may not be guarantees that the best and most appropriate questions are raised or that the most fruitful lines of inquiry will be followed. However, it puts the onus directly on students to understand enough of the material so that they can lead class discussions.

In fact, many false starts occur when students lead class discussion and I have to admit that there are many times when I needed to intervene to keep the discussion running smoothly.

Class debrief at the end of the day in Hanoi

Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi

Through gradual prodding and demonstrating good questions, slowly the students learned to undertake more of the responsibility for carrying on class discussions. Admittedly, this approach works best in small groups and hence will not totally replace traditional classroom teaching. But what is powerful is that in this manner, the students construct their own learning with access to conventional concepts and modeling via questions and probing rather than pure direction (Driver et. al 1994).

One challenge I encountered when implementing learner-centred learning approaches is that the teacher must constantly act as a mentor and guide to ensure that the learning is meaningful. Yes, it is definitely more effort on the part of the teacher to constantly check that the student’s assignments were headed in the right direction. But the good part is that because students had ownership of their learning, they were more motivated and they were more inclined to pose questions that were pointed and better thought out. In fact, many of the evenings in Vietnam were spent discussing what could be better done in terms of approaching their assignments and all these were initiated at the request of the students.

Students at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology

One final point of note though, that not all students may like learner-centred learning approaches because some students may have mastered the traditional rules well and would not want to risk getting a lower grade by playing the learning game in a new way. However, with adequate persuasion and encouragement, I believe students can be convinced to be more involved in the learning process as most of them do not like to passively listen to lectures.

In essence, what I did was to conduct introductory lectures on what exactly is social psychology during the pre-departure workshops in Singapore. This is important as it provides an appropriate perspective with which students can frame their assignment questions. The students also conducted research on their topic of choice and discussed how they would approach this topic during these sessions.

Once in Hanoi, the students would embark on their interviews and participant observations with the street children. My role then was that of a mentor, checking periodically to see if the student projects were on track.

Back in Singapore, post-trip debriefing sessions were held more like consultation sessions where students not only organized their field notes but importantly asked questions to make sense of their observations. This is important as it ensures that their concepts are correctly applied and their learning is meaningful.

In Conclusion

By using a learner-centred learning approach, I feel that the students learned more because they were motivated by their own curiosity and interests. By carefully influencing and controlling these inquisitions, students definitely learn more than simply listening to me lecture on concepts in social psychology. And all these happened because the students were involved in their own learning.

Author

Leslie Tey is a lecturer in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, at Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Singapore.

References

Driver, R., Asoko, H., Leach, J., Mortimer, E. and Scott, P. (1994). Constructing Scientific Knowledge in the Classroom. Educational Researcher, 32 (7).

Rallis, Sharon F. (1995). Creating Learner Centered Schools: Dreams and Practices. Theory into Practice, Volume 34, Number 4, Autumn. College of Education, The Ohio State University.