The Mekong Delta Research Project as a Tool for Building a Pedagogical Approach

As an opportunity to discuss “Teaching in Research,” at EDAR’s Fourth Rencontre, I will be sharing my past experience in teaching without a Ph.D. and why I have decided to invest in obtaining a Ph.D. I shall discuss the differences between teaching with and without a Ph.D., and how a Ph.D. would serve to better define my contribution as an educator. Whereas the first part of the paper addresses the questions of the corresponding relationship between teaching and research, the body regards a discussion of the start of my Ph.D. research, and how my topic is currently positioned as a means of bridging the gap between a contextual territory and how it may be reframed to explain a hypothesis or theoretical viewpoint. As an urban designer who quickly transitioned into a career in teaching at university, the extent of my pedagogical approach was limited due to how knowledge was further obtained – through an ad-hoc accumulation of knowledge found in books, journals, and articles. In hindsight, there was a lack of critical knowledge direction and theoretical approach (found in a curriculum), that would offer more guidance and shed light into relevant schools of thought, and pedagogical approaches related to my research interests. Without experiencing the rigor of knowledge building via the Ph.D. research process, a-priori assumptions on pedagogy offered no additional perspectives to a given theory. The paper argues the reason why arriving at a complete Ph.D. research project would allow one to gain the required tools into becoming a more qualified professor. The rigorous and iterative process of re-organizing information to build one’s framing of a situation at hand creates one’s critical stance or hypothesis, whereby to address present and future challenges in the field. A Ph.D. can unlock the tools necessary pedagogically, to build the kind of criticality desirable in an academic. My research topic in the Mekong Delta currently serves as a process for building my pedagogical knowledge and understanding. The Mekong Delta traverses six Asian countries starting from the Tibetan plateau and ending in the South China Sea, which positions it in relation to multiple urban-rural realities. With increasingly unpredictable tropical climates, changing river flows and coastal levels; water resources in South East Asia are increasingly squeezed as nearly 70% of freshwater is channeled into industrial uses in agriculture and food production-related processes. The settlements in the Mekong rely on access to vast landscape resources, including access to water, currently treated as an open and limitless resource. The natural assets of the Delta’s ecological landscape have been increasingly harvested by processes of industrialization and urbanization, resulting in a kind of diffused organization between settlement patterns, water systems, and agricultural fields. The current proposal is a study of the relationship between the peri-urban regions and the Deltaic water syst