Tran Viet Dung Dinh

How did you hear about the School of Education and why did you choose to study here?

Some places you find. Others seem to find you, and you only realise it later.

Leeds was the second kind. I first came across the name one late evening. It was just a word at first, the kind you read and forget. Except I didn't forget it. It kept returning, in odd moments, like a song you only half remember.

At the time, I was finishing my bachelor's degree and standing at that strange edge where one chapter has ended and the next hasn't been written yet. Most people around me were stepping away from study for a while. I understood why. But I was carrying something I couldn't quite set down, a question about teaching. It wasn't a dramatic question. It was small and stubborn; the kind that sits quietly in your pocket and makes itself known whenever you reach for something else.

I didn't choose Leeds because I believed it would answer that question. If anything, I suspected it wouldn't. I chose it because it felt like a place that would let me keep asking, slowly, without being told to hurry. That, to me, seemed rarer than answers.

So I packed my things, said goodbye to people who were used to seeing me every day, and followed the word that wouldn't let me forget it.

Tell us about your course – why did you choose it? What elements of the course inspired you to study here?

I had been trained to be a teacher before I arrived. I knew how to walk into a classroom, how to read the silence at the start of a lesson, how to tell the difference between a quiet student who was lost and one who was simply thinking. What I didn't know was why some lessons came alive while others, planned just as carefully, slipped quietly through my fingers.

I chose MA Education because I wanted to understand what happens beneath the surface of a lesson. Not the techniques themselves, but the reasons behind them.

What I hadn't expected was how much room the course would give me to bring my own world into it. My classroom, my students, the rhythms of education in Vietnam were never treated as background details. They were welcome in the conversation. In a module called “Education, Language and Society”, something shifted. My question began to change shape. It became less about how students learn English, and more about something quieter - how they learn to trust, or doubt, what they read in it. In a world where young people meet more English on their phone screens than in their textbooks, that felt like a question worth carrying.

The course didn't tell me where to go with it. It simply handed me better tools, and then, with a kind of respectful patience, stepped aside.

What was the best part of your studies – what did you enjoy the most?

The small moments worth photographing.

The walk to campus in the early morning, when the city was still deciding whether to wake up. The particular silence after a difficult question in a seminar, when everyone was genuinely thinking and nobody rushed to fill the space. Long afternoons in the library where the light moved slowly across the desks and the hours passed without asking for permission. Reading a paper three times and understanding nothing, then reading it a fourth time on a bus and understanding everything.

I enjoyed the slowness. Ideas at Leeds rarely arrived when I called for them. They came days later, sideways. It could happen on a walk, in the queue for coffee, halfway through a sentence about something else entirely. At first that frustrated me. Eventually I began to trust it. I learned that thinking isn't always something you do. Sometimes it's something that happens to you, if you leave the door open long enough.

And then there were the conversations with classmates, teachers from places I had never been. We would describe our classrooms to each other and discover, again and again, that they were completely different and somehow exactly the same. Those moments made the world feel both larger and closer at once.

What were your career aspirations? Do you think the experience and skills you’ve gained here have helped you in your career plans? In what way?

I have always known I would teach. That part was never the mystery. The mystery was what kind of teacher I would become.

Throughout my placement, I continued teaching, leading large group classes and working with students individually. It meant living between two rooms. In one, I read about teaching theories: studies, arguments that stretched across decades. In the other, I stood in front of real learners with real moods, real deadlines and real distractions. The two rooms kept speaking to each other. Something I read on a Monday would find its way into a lesson by Thursday. Something a student said on Friday would send me back to my reading over the weekend. I became a kind of quiet messenger between them.

What Leeds gave me was not a plan so much as a way of seeing. I notice more now. The small hesitation before a student answers, the activity that works for reasons I can finally name. I ask "why" before I ask "how." I am calmer when things go wrong and more curious about what went wrong.

As for where I'm going, I hope to continue teaching and, one day, support teachers who are just beginning their own journeys, as I am now, in those first years when every lesson feels like a test and every mistake feels larger than it is. I know that feeling well. If I can make it a little lighter for someone else, that would be enough of a career for me.

The rest I hold lightly. The path, I've noticed, tends to appear only once I'm already walking on it.

Do you have any noteworthy achievements from your study at the School of Education that you can tell us about?

I’m not sure I have achievements in the way this question imagines. I didn't win anything or break any records. Most of what I did that year happened quietly, at a desk, late in the evening.

If there is one thing I would mention, it's my dissertation. I spent the year exploring how media and information literacy might find a small place inside English lessons for new teachers in Vietnam. It was a modest project, and it taught me far more than I could ever teach through it. What stays with me most is not the finished work, but the teachers who gave their time to take part. They were busy, tired, and under no obligation to help a student they barely knew. They helped anyway, and shared their thoughts with an honesty I didn't expect. Whatever is good in that work belongs as much to them as to me.

Beyond that, the things I'm quietly glad about are smaller. I learned to balance studying with working. I learned to ask for help instead of pretending I didn't need it. I learned to rest without feeling guilty, and to keep going in weeks when progress was too slow to see.

None of these would look like much written on a certificate. But they're the ones I expect to carry with me the longest.

What was your experience of the facilities, the staff, your peers, the city of Leeds, and the Yorkshire region?

My year in Leeds grew in widening circles, the way ripples move outward from a single stone.

It began with a desk. Laidlaw Library, a seat by a window that I quietly came to think of as mine. Most of my thinking started there, in the slow hours when the light shifted across the table and the only sounds were pages turning. Someone else is probably sitting in that seat now, carrying a question of their own. I like to imagine that.

From the desk, the circle widened to the people. The staff had a way of listening that I hadn't often met before. They let me arrive with a tangle of half-formed ideas and somehow helped me leave holding a single clear thread. Around me were classmates from every corner of the world, each carrying a classroom in their head. We compared our teaching lives the way travellers compare maps. The roads were different, the landmarks unfamiliar, yet our destinations kept turning out to be the same. Many of the most important things I learned that year were said over coffee rather than in seminars.

Beyond the campus, the circle widened again, into the city itself. Leeds is grey stone and sudden sunlight, rain that never quite commits, streets that seem ordinary until you walk them often enough to notice their small secrets. It is a city that asks very little of you, which is perhaps why it stays with you long after you leave.

And at the outer edge of the circle was Yorkshire. I'll keep most of it to myself. Let's just say that some of my clearest thoughts arrived there, among the hills and the silence, far from anything I was supposed to be thinking about.

Are there any experiences outside of your studies that you have particularly enjoyed?

It never snowed the year I lived in Leeds. I waited for it, the way people from warm countries always do, glancing at the sky on cold mornings and hoping. It never came.

And yet, when I look back, that year feels like a long, quiet snowfall.

Leaving home is a kind of snow. It falls silently over everything you once knew how to do without thinking: where to buy what you need, how to start a conversation, which way to turn at the end of the street. All the familiar paths disappear under a single white page. No footprints. Nothing to follow. At first, that blankness frightened me. Then, slowly, it became something else, a strange kind of freedom. If there are no footprints, you are allowed to make your own.

So I made them. Long walks in the cold, when the afternoons ended before I'd noticed them begin and the streetlights flickered on while I was still thinking about lunch. Cooking food from home for friends who had never tasted it, and watching steam rise from the bowls into the chilly evening air. Wandering without a destination and turning into streets I could never find again, no matter how hard I tried.

And the calls home. Vietnam was always a few hours ahead, so one of us was forever beginning a day the other was finishing. On the coldest nights, those calls felt like cupping my hands around something warm.

Snow also brings a particular silence, the kind that swallows every other sound. I lived inside that silence for a while. Some evenings it pressed closer than I'd like to admit. But I learned to sit with it, and eventually to listen to it. It taught me how to be quiet without being lonely.

The snow that never fell has melted now. But if you had walked behind me at the end of that year, I think you would have seen it: a trail of footprints across a white field that no one else could see.

Mine.

Would you recommend the School of Education to others who are considering studying here?

Yes, though perhaps not for the reasons people usually give.

Before the world went digital, photographs were developed in darkrooms. You would take a blank sheet of paper, lower it into a tray of liquid under a dim red light, and wait. For a long moment, nothing. Then, faintly, an image would begin to rise from the white, a shadow first, then an edge, then a face you recognised. It couldn't be rushed. Too much light, and the picture would be lost.

Studying here felt like that. Leeds is not a place of floodlights. It is a quiet room with a patient red glow, where the things you came with slowly reveal what they really are. You might arrive with a question about your students, your classroom, your country, or yourself as a teacher. The School won't take that question away from you, and it won't hand you a finished picture to replace it. Instead, it gives you the time, the people and the stillness for that question to develop, to come into focus at its own pace.

It won't always be easy. There will be grey mornings, long nights, and moments when the paper stays stubbornly blank and you wonder why you came so far. Wait a little longer. Something is always forming, even when you can't yet see it.

I arrived in Leeds with a small, stubborn question in my pocket.

I still have it, by the way. It has simply come into focus.