Family resources refer to the herder family’s financial resources and social resources or networks. Herder parents were more likely to make decisions about their children’s living arrangements depending on their financial and social resources.
Financial resources. Three out of the five participants in this study reported that their families were enrolled in the GFSP, which meant these families were poor and vulnerable.
It was found that sending two to three children to school was economically challenging for them. Two of the families who decided on the dormitory for their children said,
The school dormitory is free of charge. Once I asked the dormitory teacher if there was something necessary for my children that I should provide. But she said there was no need.
My 3rd grade son rides race horses. During his summer vacation, we sent him to someone’s home to ride race horses. My son came back home in August and the horse owner gave us some money. We bought school materials and uniforms for our two children and left them in school dormitory free of charge.
In Mongolia, there are national and local festivals which include horse racing as a main part. These festivals are usually held in summer, but some are held in spring and autumn.
Children, mainly boys, aged seven and above often ride race horses.
Social resources. Herders are often under a heavy workload and this may influence their decision about their children’s living arrangement. A mother left her children with relatives so she could stay in the countryside with her husband herding. But when the children called saying they missed their mommy she often came to the county center for a couple of days.
However, when it was time for the peak period of the lambing season, she could not leave her husband alone and come and visit her children. She said,
Before March I will put my three children in the school dormitory because very soon it is the lambing season. And also, we will move to our spring camp, which is 37 kilometers away from our current winter camp. Our current camp is 20 kilometers away from the county center.
70 As an alternative to the dormitory, parents usually had their children stay with their relatives, usually grandparents or aunts. A parent felt satisfied with her child’s caregiver and this did not allow her to think of other types of living arrangements:
Because my child stays with his grandmother, I have no plans to put him in the school dormitory.
The transcripts show that herder parents and extended family members mutually support each other. A parent whose child stayed with the grandmother admitted the following:
When our child stays with his grandmother, we contribute to the household food.
However, there was a parent whose family was enrolled in the GFSP who thought relatives could not take good care of her children. She chose the school dormitory in order to prevent any misunderstanding with them.
The school dormitory is better than relatives because my boys may make them upset.
Nowadays children are behaving differently and my relatives may not manage them. But the dormitory keeps good control over children.
4.1.4. Conclusion
The Mongolian herder parents’ interpretations of their experiences of managing their children’s living arrangements during the school year in response to the lowered age school attendance and insufficient conditions of boarding school settings were found to yield four themes. The four themes were mainly related to (a) having six-year-old school children; (b) pastoralist parents’ own school experiences; (c) boarding school conditions; and (d) family resources. The findings of this study may help minimize livelihood challenges faced by herders by providing research-based evidence for educators and policy makers to better understand these important education policies and pastoralist’ responses to them.
The participants in this study were from different backgrounds and they engaged in different herding positions including herding their own herds, getting hired as full-time herders, and getting hired as a part-time herder. Also, the participating parents chose different living arrangements for their school children including using the school dormitory, staying at a relative’s place, and splitting households. However, this study also found that herder children had different living arrangements in different school years. For instance, especially when a child started school at age six, mothers more often moved to the county center and stayed with the child for a year. Herder mothers were more likely to leave the
71 child in the school dormitory or at a relative’s place after the child finished the first grade.
A similar observation was made in a previous study (Sukhbaatar, 2018a) finding that pre-service teachers reported parental involvement among herder parents was better when children were in the 1st grade because often mothers moved to the county or provincial centers and stayed with their children. Moreover, splitting households has been reported not only to make men in remote pastures face labor shortages (Ahearn & Bumochir, 2016), but was also an emotionally negative experience for the wife staying with her children and always worrying about her husband and herds in remote areas, especially when the weather was bad. Bad weather conditions may harm well-being of herders and also well-being of their livestock herds. Without splitting the household, children who were left behind in the school dormitory or at relative’s places missed their parents.
Relatives were an important group of people who were involved in living arrangements for herder children. These relatives acted in place of parents when the herder children lived with them during the school year. It was found that herder parents were likely to contribute to the relative’s household to some extent. Moreover, findings of the study suggested that relatives or extended family members were not always the preferable living arrangement option for some herder families.
Herder parents seemed to feel more comfortable when two or more children of a family stayed together in the dormitory. In this study’s school dormitory, there were six six-year-old children staying with their siblings who were attending 3rd, 4th, and 6th grades. The dormitory attempts to provide a family-oriented atmosphere (Steiner-Khamsi & Stolpe, 2006) for herder children by allowing them to stay in the same room if siblings are the same gender.
Sending children to school, especially six-year-old children, has put a great pressure on herder families. To provide their children with proper schooling, herders need to overcome various challenges in terms of finance, social networks, emotional separation, and reduced labor force. Hence, the government tries to address the issue; for instance, the MECSS’s regulation (2016) of addressing herder parent’s request to delay sending a child to school at the age of six has been implemented since 2016. This exception helps this disadvantaged group feel more flexible in deciding when to send their children to school away from home.
When a herder family faces one of the reasons stated in the regulation, herders make a request that formalizes the absence of the child from school. This may help prevent issues such as reporting absence from school and having pupils drop out while promoting a mutual
72 understanding between school and herder family leading to an increase in parental satisfaction with the school.
4.2. Sub-study 2. The mesosystem: Teachers’ experiences in communicating with pastoralist parents
4.2.1. Introduction
Research shows that parental involvement or engagement is beneficial not only to children, but also to parents and teachers yielding results in improved school attendance, attitudes, behavior, and mental health of children; improved parent-teacher relationships, and increased parental confidence, satisfaction and interest in education; and improved teacher morale and school climate (Hornby & Lafaele, 2011). Recent Mongolian education policy documents emphasize the importance of parental involvement and school-family communication in teaching and learning (Sukhbaatar, 2014, 2018a, 2018b). Mongolia adopted a new core curriculum for primary education in the 2014-2015 school year. In accordance with this core curriculum adoption, the Minister of Education and Science stated that one of the responsibilities of a teacher is to plan activities together with parents for promoting each pupil’s success (MES, 2014a). Moreover, teachers are required to involve parents, local people, and local organizations in promoting pupils’ learning and in establishing effective communication with each of these groups. It is also the teacher’s responsibility to provide all families with proper information about the child and school and communicate this information using the most appropriate method considering each parent’s situation (Symeou et al., 2012).
The international literature indicated that communication with families living in remote areas and involving these families has been challenging, but also supportive in some communities. Parental involvement in children’s education among Australian Aboriginal groups and Torres Strait Islander families is barely visible in boarding schools (Benveniste, Guenther, Dawson, & Rainbird, 2014). Cao (2016) conducted a study in boarding schools in a Chinese county where Tibetan inhabitants lived as nomads or lived a semi-farming/semi-nomadic lifestyle. Cao reported that often less than half of the parents would visit the school on the parental visiting days due to long distances and travel expenses. But another study, involving Maori parents from two suburban schools in New Zealand, indicated parents appreciated the number of communication methods these schools used including emails, phone calls, and a website (Hall, Hornby, & Macfarlane, 2015).
73 One important example of diverse families in Mongolia is mobile pastoralists who live in remote areas and herd their livestock in open pastures. As one pre-service teacher reported in Sukhbaatar’s study (2018a), communicating with pastoralist parents, especially with those living far away from their school children, would be a big problem for her once she starts teaching. The present study aims to explore the experiences of classroom teachers communicating with pastoralist parents at the primary school level in Mongolia.
4.2.2. Methodology
The present sub-study explored how classroom teachers communicated with pastoralist parents living in open pastures in remote areas while their primary school children stayed in the county center to attend school. Because this study explored how classroom teachers made sense of their experiences related to communication with pastoralist parents, IPA was the chosen methodology. As Padilla-Diaz (2015) explains, these teachers were able to
“articulate their lived experiences” (p. 104) in communicating with pastoralist parents during the school year.
County School A was chosen for the study as almost half of the pupils (45%) the school served were from pastoralist households. According to the acting principal of the school, the most remote herder households were situated 200 kilometers away from the county center and most of the families were situated 70-80 kilometers away (T. Dolgormaa, personal communication, February 5, 2018).
Participants in this study had “common meaningful and significant experience” (Yüksel
& Yıldırım, 2015, p. 5) in communicating with pastoralist parents. Of the seven primary education teachers in the school year when the data were collected, five were recruited for the study (see Table 9).
Table 9. The sample of the Sub-study 2 Research
question
Study Participant representatives
Sample School Instrument
RQ 2 Sub-study 2 Classroom teachers N=5 School A Interview protocol for classroom teachers
74 As for the participants’ teaching experiences, one was in her first-year teaching at primary school with three quarters of the school year experience communicating with pastoralist parents. The remaining four teachers had four to 30 years of teaching experiences. While three of the teachers graduated from a local HEI, the other two had graduated from a HEI in the capital. All teachers had 12 to 18 pupils from herder families in their classes. The herder pupils used all three main options of living arrangement: dormitory, relatives, and split households.
4.2.3. Findings
Four themes emerged from the data analysis: (a) the experience of teachers’ communicating with pastoralist parents; (b) the challenges teachers face in communicating with the parents;
(c) the needs of teachers when communicating with the parents; and (d) the desires teachers expressed for ideal communications with pastoralist parents. The resulting themes facilitated a deeper understanding of teachers’ cumulative experiences in communicating with pastoralist parents at a primary school level in rural Mongolia.