Dr Laura Grassick leads a new project with Vietnamese language educators exploring culturally responsive pedagogies

Following a British Council UK/Vietnam Season 23 Collaboration Grant Call, Laura Grassick and team (Judith Hanks, along with colleagues from Vietnam National University in Hanoi and University New South Wales in Sydney) have been successful in their application and secured a grant of £20,000 for their one-year project "A Community of Exploratory Practice: Teachers' Developing Culturally Responsive English Language Pedagogy in Ethnic Minority Group areas in Vietnam".

The project aims to support English language teachers in one mountainous area in Vietnam explore their own classrooms, learners and teaching practice to get a better understanding of how to engage and motivate learners from ethnic minority groups in English language learning. Through a community of exploratory practice and in-school mentoring, teachers will have the opportunity to plan and try out classroom approaches and activities which reflect and value learners' own language and cultural heritage.

Planned outputs include teacher-designed culturally appropriate teaching resources, a set of trainer materials, multimodal case studies of teachers’ stories of exploratory practice, and an online community of practitioner researchers. The project will stimulate new insights and narratives around culture and language through connections with international language teachers in already established networks e.g. International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) ‘Fully Inclusive Practitioner Research Network’.