Transforming Pedagogies Through Engagement with Learners, Teachers and Communities

This book identifies three types of influential forces that pose challenges to innovations: socio-cultural dynamics, teacher individuality, and local circumstances. It uses languages, cultural traits, and intellectual heritages in the Asia-Pacific region as an example to show the resistance to Western-based pedagogies due to disparities between the innovations and these local heritages. It reveals personal and professional values that teachers hold and how these values, while seemingly supporting creative ideologies, happen to prevent them from incorporating innovations in their practices. The book discusses how informal educational activities and services that a society possesses could impede pedagogical innovations. There is, therefore, a need for institutions and educators to develop a positive relationship between these phenomena and teaching innovations.

Dr. Dat Bao has worked with Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK, Cornell University in the US, the National University of Singapore, the Assumption University of Thailand, and over the past thirteen years has lectured in Monash University. His expertise includes creative pedagogy, curriculum design, intercultural communication, materials development, classroom silence, literacy development, and visual pedagogy in language education. He is the author of Understanding Silence and Reticence: Nonverbal participation in Second Language Acquisition (2014), Poetry for Education. Classroom Ideas that Inspire Creativity (2017), Creativity and Innovations in ELT Material Development: Looking beyond the Current Design (2018).
Dr. Thanh Pham has been working in higher education for more than 10 years. Her main research areas are graduate employability, intercultural education, and education internationalisation. She has been conducting substantial research on internationalisation of higher education curricula and enhancing interactions of students from various backgrounds and contexts. Thanh is heavily researching graduate employability with a focus on unpacking how graduates develop strategies to navigate barriers in the labour markets. She has conducted research in various countries and developed comparative models showing resources/capitals that graduates should be aware of and develop so that they could thrive in both host and home labour markets. Her research has been published on a range of reputational journals and book publishers. Thanh has also successfully transferred her research into teaching by developing new teaching courses about education to work transitions at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.