Sailing in the Winds of Change: A Resilient Journey of Engaging with Quality Assurance in the Adaptation of Imported Ideas and Practices

Teaching evaluation is pivotal in higher education because it impacts the quality of faculty members who contribute significantly to student learning improvement. In Vietnam, the introduction of the quality assurance (QA) system for nearly two decades has placed student evaluation of teaching (SET) as an official QA practice across Vietnamese higher education institutions. Previous studies have indicated the limited impact of SET on Vietnamese higher education teaching and learning improvement, partially due to the ongoing tension among various ideologies (e.g., neoliberalism or Confucianism) embedded in the contemporary Vietnamese higher education. Despite a common discourse in the existing literature depicting Vietnamese faculty members as being passively compliant, little is known about how they, as pivotal QA stakeholders, have creatively participated in the teaching evaluation via informal sources of student evaluation and how their agency has been exercised. Based on the concept of faculty agency, this chapter fills the existing gap by exploring faculty members’ creative approaches to informal SET. Findings from this qualitative case study, which involves in-depth interviews with eight faculty members from a Vietnamese public university, demonstrate that the participants informally engaged in the SET, during which their identities were reconfigured. This engagement was promoted by innovative views of teaching and evaluation. In contrast, it was hindered by their limited autonomy and students’ indifference to learning. Our study suggests implications for improving practice-based QA policymaking and empowering faculty members in the QA process.