“…Vietnamese higher education is heavily influenced by external systems, especially China and the West, in terms of organizing structures and policies, curriculum content, intellectual influences, teaching methodology, and quality assurance, for example (Le, 2014;Nguyen & Hamid, 2015;Tran & Marginson, 2018;Tran et al, 2017Tran et al, , 2020. Studies have identified a range of reasons for weak research capacity (Pho & Tran, 2016;Ta & Zyngier, 2018), but underneath individual and institutional difficulties lies a lack of confidence in building an independent research system and foregrounding a distinctive voice. Our study aims to give voice to the practitioners of service-learning in Viet Nam as the foundation for further research.…”