The research was approved (ethical approval reference number: 4/2019) by the IRB of the Doctoral School of Education at the University of Szeged. Before the study was conducted in the remote counties in an Eastern Mongolian province, an educational specialist in charge of primary education in the Provincial Board of Education under the MECSS of Mongolia was officially informed about the study.
Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. The participants understood and signed the informed consent agreement printed in both Mongolian and English before the interviews. To the two illiterate parents I read the informed consent in Mongolian and they signed the agreement. They could learn to write their names.
61 CHAPTER 4. FINDINGS
This chapter presents three empirical sub-studies focusing on the three research questions.
Each sub-study is organized into four sections of introduction, methodology, findings, and conclusion. The introduction sections present the purposes of sub-studies. The methodology sections are focused on the number and characteristics of participants as these sub-studies used different sample sizes from different sites. The findings sections outline themes and sub-themes that emerged from IPA providing the thick rich descriptions and invaluable quotes from the participants. Finally, the conclusions are drawn from the findings.
The findings presented in this research are organized following the proposed ecological model of contexts of school and pastoralist family communication presented Chapter Two of this dissertation. An ecological model of contexts of communication between school and pastoralist family in rural Mongolia is developed based on the findings of the three sub-studies (see Figure 4). Unlike the proposed ecological model (see Figure 3) this validated model includes some new factors such as communication facility and social system.
While the first sub-study discusses the findings of herder parents’ experiences in managing their children’s living arrangements in response to educational policies at the microsystem level, the second sub-study discusses findings of classroom teachers’
experiences in communicating with herder parents at the mesosystem level using data from five herder parents and five teachers respectively. These participants are from the same school. However, the last sub-study presents the contextual factors impacting school and herder family communication at the exosystem and macrosystem levels by adding data from five teachers and five herder parents from the second county school to the data from the 10 participants of the previous two sub-studies. In this last sub-study, the findings of the previous two sub-studies are presented more deeply and specifically in some themes and sub-themes in relation to the different contextual factors at the larger system level.
62 Figure 4. An ecological model: Contexts of communication between school and
pastoralist family in rural Mongolia
[Adapted from Pang’s (2011) contextual factors and home-school cooperation model, p. 2]
63 4.1. Sub-study 1. The microsystem: Pastoralist parents’ response to educational policies and their impact on living arrangements for school age children
4.1.1. Introduction
When the new education system of 12 years was adopted there were debates about placing six-year-old children from herder families in school dormitories. Later the President passed a decree in 2014, requiring schools to provide a pleasant learning and living environment for six-year-olds. In the decree, it was stated that local governments, based on their resources, should provide a specialized teacher who is able to support the six-year-olds’
learning, development, and emotional needs, and to partner closely with the children’s parents and caregivers. Besides the specialized teacher, it was also required that local agencies should provide an assistant teacher who would help the young pupils practice a healthy and hygienic lifestyle in the school dormitory. However, these teachers are generally not available because of a lack of economic resources in rural communities (Sanjaabadam, 2014).
Mongolian “herders value education and actively enroll their children in formal schools”
(Ahearn & Bumochir, 2016, p. 91) and formal education has long been popularized among Mongolian herders (Stolpe, 2016). Homes located in remote areas, severe weather conditions, and poor infrastructure require children from herder families to settle near schools for the duration of the school year. Due to poor conditions and a lack of human resources in boarding school dormitories, herder families often decide on different living arrangements for their school children depending on their household size, number of school children, financial resources, social resources or networks, type of livestock, and other factors (Ahearn & Bumochir, 2016). Currently, herder parents use three main living arrangement options including (a) school dormitories, (b) relative’s places, and (c) split households.
Researchers (Ahearn & Bumochir, 2016) argued that Mongolia’s current school system posed challenges to nomadic herders’ livelihoods and this system needed to be examined.
The present sub-study aims to explore how herder parents’ experiences influence their decision for making living arrangement for their primary school children during the school year in response to educational policies.
64 4.1.2. Methodology
This sub-study employed an IPA to explore experiences of herder families regarding the different living arrangements they used when they sent their children to primary school and to understand how these families interpreted their experiences with the resulting living conditions. IPA researchers “concentrate more on the depth, rather than breadth of the study”
(Pietkiewicz & Smith, 2014, p. 364). In this regard, five participants were interviewed in this sub-study (see Table 8).
Table 8. The sample of the Sub-study 1 Research
question
Study Participant representatives
Sample School Instrument
RQ 1 Sub-study 1 Herder parents N=5 School A Interview protocol for herder parents
The research site consisted of seven primary classes from first to fifth grades with 143 pupils in County School A. The five parents (four female and one male) were from different backgrounds in terms of education, size of herds, and living arrangements for their children.
Among the participants two were illiterate and had left school when they were in their first grade. One parent finished primary school and the other two finished lower secondary school. Four parents were in their 30s and one was in his 50s. Three parents were hired as herders and did not own any herds themselves. These families were poor and vulnerable, and they enrolled in the GFSP. The remaining two families owned around 300 and 1,000 livestock head respectively. One family moved to the county center and the husband herded for someone as a part-time herder. Two of the families had three school children and each pastoralist family had two children in the primary school, except for one who had one child.
The pastoralist parents had chosen the school dormitory, a relative’s place, and split household for their school children’s living arrangement.
4.1.3. Findings
The current study explored how herder parents interpreted their experiences in dealing with living arrangements for their children during the school year. During the analysis four themes emerged and each theme was divided into two sub-themes. The four themes were:
(a) children starting school; (b) education-minded herder parents; (c) shared experiences;
and (d) family resources.
65 Theme 1. Starting School
The most common issue which made parents decide on their current living arrangements for their children was the child’s age and age-related experiences.
Dealing with a six-year-old. Participants noted the requirement to send their six-year-olds to school was not easy, because the children were quite young. A mother, who had two children staying in the school dormitory and who waited to send her younger child to school a year later when he was seven, explained,
Two of us [my husband and I] were hired to herd someone’s livestock herd and then neither of us were able to leave for the county center with the child to go to school. Instead, we sent him when he was seven, so he could stay in the dormitory with his older brother.
Another mother, who split the household, said:
If the child had gone to school at age seven, I would have never stayed with my child in the 1st year leaving behind my husband alone with livestock herding… always worrying about him [my husband] and herds when the weather was bad.
Assuring a good start. A mother who chose a split household for the school year when her child started school at age six felt, however, that it was better for her to stay together with the child in the first year so she could work with the child more closely and efficiently and the child could learn better.
This mother said,
The six-year-olds get tired very easily because they have lots of tasks to complete. So, I should better help the child with HW.
The mother added if the child learned better from the beginning, she would struggle less in subsequent school years in upper grades when the mother left her to stay in the school dormitory or at a relative’s place.
Coming from the countryside and adjusting to a new place is not easy for the six-year-olds who have not gone to preschool and have not visited places in the county center before.
A parent who chose split households in her child’s first year also considered her child’s safety saying,
Every time I had to follow my child because there are cars and dogs in the streets.
66 Parents tended to feel more comfortable when there were two or more children staying together in the same place. A parent’s response showed that his two children, in the 1st and 4th grades, were doing well together in the dormitory:
My oldest daughter stayed at my relative’s before and now she is together with her sister in the dormitory. The oldest did not go to preschool and she was shy. But now she gets along well with others while she is together with her sister in there.