International Projects

Sustainable Community Development Is Focus of Education Project in Vietnam

It should come as no surprise that internationally engaged faculty members in MSU's College of Education expect there to be educational solutions to serious world problems. Historically, faculty from that college have been involved in the establishment of educational programs, and even new universities, in countries around the world. More recently, projects in Southeast Asia headed by Chris Wheeler in teacher education employ unique strategies and collaborative partnerships to attack simultaneously problems such as poverty, malnutrition, and environmental degradation in rural settings.

The most recent of these projects, "Integrating Educational Improvement with Environmental Resource Management to Reduce Poverty in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam," is a joint project between Michigan State University and Cantho University (CTU), the main university for the province of Cantho in the Mekong Delta area of Vietnam. CTU is a large comprehensive university with a college of agriculture, a college of education, and a land-grant focus. Its facilities include an agricultural research station in the village of Hoa An attuned to the needs of the surrounding rice-producing farms.

The project is being funded by a two-and-a-half-year grant of $318,000 from the Shell Sustainable Communities Programme as well as a $120,000 three-year linkage grant from the U.S. Department of State. Wheeler, along with MSU colleagues Phu Van Nguyen (forestry), Jim Gallagher (teacher education), William Hug (teacher education) and postdoctoral student Annelise Carleton (fisheries and wildlife), are working with Cantho University colleagues, led by Le Quang Minh, vice rector and professor at the institution, and including Phung Thi Nguyet Hong, Shell grant manager, and Duong Quang Minh, linkage grant project manager and Cantho lecturer in physics education.

rly by improving household income, reducing malnutrition, and helping villagers address important natural resource management issues through an innovative approach to education and learning. Serious poverty characterizes rural village life in the Mekong Delta. Among the many causes of poverty, environmental resource management practices and a generally ineffective education system are two major ones.

"What is unique about our project is the integrated approach to correcting these problems," Wheeler says. "Our strategy to address this problem of rural poverty is to link schools and communities in new ways. We have learned that schools, and particularly children from the village, can be a very powerful force for raising issues that the villagers know something about, but have never addressed on a collective level."

The Cantho project is modeled on an earlier multidisciplinary project Wheeler directed in the late 1990s in Thailand, the "Social Forestry, Education, and Participation Project." In addition to Wheeler and Gallagher from the College of Education, the project included Maureen McDonough from the Department of Forestry, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Funded by the Ford Foundation, the MSU Foundation, and the government of Thailand, the project took place in an area of northern Thailand with major deforestation problems. Students in rural primary and secondary schools studied local problems related to forest management and then worked with villagers on small-scale social forestry projects.

In Wheeler's words, "The overall project objective is to promote sustainable community development in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, particulaThe Cantho project is actually two interlinked projects. One, funded by the Shell grant, is a community development project designed to boost household income by expanding the sources of income generation. The other, funded by the linkage grant, focuses on teacher education, with the objective that future teachers will move away from teaching methods emphasizing rote memorization toward more participatory teaching involving the understanding of real-world problems.

A primary support facility for the project is CTU's research station, located about 40 kilometers from the campus in the village of Hoa An. The facility, Wheeler explains, "currently specializes in research on the effects of acid sulfate soil, but has a farm systems approach, where they are actually doing a lot of small-scale household-income-generating projects." Through the Shell grant project, the research station is being expanded into a "co-learning center." Hoa An community members will have opportunities to learn about agroforestry projects, organic gardens, integrated pest management projects, aquaculture projects, ideas for expanding the kinds of livestock raised, and even biogas projects and will receive support to use their knowledge for small-scale household-income-generating projects. Widespread application of these ideas should help stem the overuse of fertilizers and pesticides, improve poor surface-water quality resulting from human and animal waste, and solve problems associated with acid sulfate soil, all of which have negative effects on rice production.

In August 2001, an initial set of workshops was held in the two target communities, An Binh (a village near the city of Cantho) and Hoa An. During the workshops, four recent CTU graduates were trained for roles as facilitators and evaluators. A learning community involving CTU faculty, local teachers and principals, and the four field workers was also developed. Between August and November, fieldworkers collected baseline data about the communities using surveys and focus groups, the lead teachers gained experience with the new teaching methods, and relationships were established with all teachers in the six schools serving the target areas.

Although still in its early stages, the Cantho project shows every sign of eventual success in meeting its community development and educational reform objectives. Faculty in MSU's College of Education and beyond who are interested in issues of international education will also find the project valuable. Wheeler is optimistic that "this project will open the door for additional ones involving Michigan State faculty in Vietnam, particularly in the Mekong Delta."