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 systems. Rapid sea-level rise in the Delta is the cause of drought and salination of the once fertile soils. Artificial alterations of the rivers and estuaries are increasingly tempering with the Delta’s ability to naturally support the cultivation of landscapes, significantly decreasing fertile land for agriculture, aquaculture and other food production. The research proposes to territorially reveal the process leading to such detrimental conditions of the Delta and to shed light on reversal processes in adaptation for the future. The research project will only be more applicable as a teaching tool if it bridges the gap between global issues, theoretical concepts and concrete examples found in local realities. The theoretical phenomena in which I am further investigating in the Mekong Delta regards Desakota, defined by Prof. Terry McGee. Moreover, my theoretical perspective and territorial approach are based on Prof. Paola Vigano’s Citta Diffusa model; whereby existing patterns of dispersed urban settlements are rooted in an isotropic valorization of water networks and related ecosystems. These serve as my pedagogical approach and hypothetical position for addressing the Mekong’s territories. An analytical approach to mapping territory is proposed as a means to produce knowledge about how the territory has transformed over time. And the reframing of the currently separate processes of water infrastructure, and Desakota expansion shall be revealed from the local perspective. The hope is that the first-hand experience gained in building the thesis project would foster a critical understanding, through the process of linking a concrete territorial situation to existing urban theory. A completed Ph.D. would offer a means of teaching specifically based on my pedagogical approach; with a newfound theoretical perspective whereby to frame and deconstruct existing theoretical works in the field.