When Local Education Becomes Fragile: Relation, Governance, and Schooling in Hanoi

Abstract

Educational reform in Vietnam aspires to cultivate learners who attend to place, yet classroom practice continues to narrow the relations through which knowledge is allowed to form. This study examines how Local Education unfolds within a centralised school system, focusing on two lower secondary schools along the restored Tô Lịch River in Hanoi. Using an embedded mixed-methods design involving surveys with forty-eight educators, semi-structured interviews with eighteen participants, and field-based observations with forty-two students, the study traces how locality is interpreted and enacted in everyday schooling. Across these encounters, three patterns recur. Locality is frequently translated into representational content rather than lived engagement; relational moments emerge through teachers’ small improvisations rather than formal design; and institutional monitoring often curtails students’ place-based inquiry. These dynamics reveal that Local Education does not fail due to lack of pedagogical intent, but because relational learning remains weakly authorised within centralised governance structures. The Entangled Local Education Framework (ELEF) is developed as an analytic lens to show how locality functions as an infrastructure of attention whose educational force depends on institutional tolerance for relation, uncertainty, and pedagogical discretion. Rather than treating Local Education as a discrete subject, the study positions it as a diagnostic site through which the moral conditions of contemporary schooling become visible.