STEM education has been considered foundational to economic growth by many countries. It has received great attention from various educational systems, but the actual implementation has triggered several problems, especially in developing countries in Asia. This qualitative study investigated the challenges to STEM education in public high schools in Vietnam. The participants were ten experienced teachers from ten different schools in a Vietnamese central province. The data were collected from in-depth semi-structured interviews. Analysis of the transcripts of the interview recordings showed that the teachers faced many challenges regarding their interdisciplinary knowledge and teaching methods, curriculum, practical constraints, and beliefs about effective STEM education. Notably, the findings concerning the teachers' beliefs about effective STEM education and the tension between their beliefs and the teaching goals were closely related to the local cultural values and the expectations of the schooling system. The findings of the study were discussed in relation to the local contextual factors and cultural values. Implications for teacher pedagogy and professional development regarding STEM education for Vietnamese high school contexts, and beyond, are discussed.

To meet the demand of the incoming school curriculum reform focusing on competency-based learning in Vietnam, this paper reports on an innovation project on developing secondary mathematics preservice teachers' (PSTs) mathematical literacy and preparing them to teach mathematics contextually. We developed a curriculum and studied the effectiveness of the implementation to a secondary mathematics PST education program that integrates mathematical literacy (ML) in methods courses. The courses offer PSTs opportunities to experience ML as active learners and prepare them to teach ML. In this paper, we discuss the results on a project-based modeling task. The results showed that the PSTs begin to develop an understanding of ML when they engaged with the phases of the modeling cycle at different levels of sophistication. The PSTs did not take advantage of visual representations to support the analysis of the project-based task and to communicate their work. Discussion about the tension between simplifying models and reflecting the real problem and directions for future study are suggested.