ABSTRACT
This research concerns a micro-political process in which pedagogical perspectives of teachers and persons who supervise them in schools that go through Learner-Centred Education (LCE) reform interact with each other. Teachers’ narratives concerning their own lessons, using video playback and field notes, allow us to define a model of the Vietnamese teacher as the ‘teacher being watched’ who is always exposed to the gazes of evaluation, eventually embodying a disposition of complying with the evaluator’s interests. This teacher value has been mediated by the socio-cultural tool of the lesson plan, which is historically assigned a specific role in the Socialist institutions of Vietnam and which prevented teachers from observing pedagogical analysis. One of the cases described a teacher’s discovery of a single student as a replacement for a mass of students, a distinct shift in socio-cultural tools for classroom observation. The cases also implied that technical-assistance projects essentially but ironically created an inverted relationship in which the teachers were expected to assist the project.
