Situating Professional Integrity in Higher Education Transformation: Lessons Learned from Vietnam and Beyond

This chapter explores the idea of professional integrity among university educators as a form of academic development that fosters creative problem-solving, teacher agency and autonomy. Higher education reforms in Vietnam have created a system that is decentralizing but still managed from the top down, internationalizing but concerned with local issues, and relatively rigid and methodologically reductive but focused on implementing new student-centered approaches to learning and teaching. The discussion draws on lessons learned from progressive university educators who craft their teaching practice, peer collaborations and academic development in the context of Vietnam’s neoliberal-oriented higher education reforms. I argue that higher education reform in Vietnam has largely overlooked the practice-oriented development of professional integrity among academic educators which risks undermining the goals of sector wide transformation. The chapter concludes with recommendations for future research.