SEAMEO-Australia Press award-winner Ms Loan Nguyen visits Melbourne
SEAMEO-Australia Press award-winner for 2008, Ms Loan Nguyen of Vietnam visited Melbourne for two weeks in November 2009, completing a program managed by Asialink. In the award’s tenth anniversary the theme was International Cooperation in Education, with the aim to explore the various forms of collaboration in education in Southeast Asia and how these improve the lives of the people of the region.Ms Loan Nguyen is a current affairs reporter at The Business Forum Newspaper in Ho Chi Minh City. Before starting her career as a journalist, Ms Loan was a high school teacher for almost ten years. Her award winning article detailed the difficulties of accessing quality education in rural Vietnam, telling the story of young students in the mountainous province of Lao Cai in northern Vietnam and the difficulties they face in attending school.
As part of her program in Melbourne she made a visit to the Distance Education Centre of Victoria, where she met with Principal Bronwyn Stubbs. This was followed a week later with a trip to Wangaratta in Victoria’s northeast where she was introduced to the Country Education Project by its Director Phil Brown.
Ms Loan met with Helen Cahill, Deputy-director of the Australian Youth Research Centre and representatives from the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development.
Ms Loan was also exposed to the multiculturalism of the Victorian education system, meeting with Principal Frank Merlino of the Victorian School of Languages and also Principal Janet Beck from West Richmond Primary School, where students are instructed partly in Vietnamese language.
The Vietnam service of Radio Australia hosted Ms Loan and showed great interest in her visit to Melbourne and reporting of education in Vietnam.
For more details about the SEAMEO-Australia Press Award visit www.seameo.org or contact David Paroissien on +61 3 8344 8474.