Teachers’ experiences in communicating with pastoralist parents in rural Mongolia: implications for teacher education and school policy

ABSTRACT

One important group of people living a special lifestyle in Mongolia is mobile pastoralists. Requirements from the government of Mongolia push pastoralist parents to send their children to schools in settled areas far from their camps. This interpretative phenomenological study explored primary school classroom teachers’ experiences in communicating with pastoralist parents during the school year. In-depth interviews were conducted involving six classroom teachers from a rural primary school in eastern Mongolia. We applied Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model to organise our findings in our interpretative phenomenological analysis. The findings indicated that classroom teachers had difficulties in communicating with pastoralist parents. The school and teachers heavily relied on a very few traditional forms of communication which was not appropriate given the pastoralist parents’ unique situation. This suggested the need for preparing pre-service teachers better for partnering with pastoralist families and their extended family members, and the need for further professional development on this topic for both teachers and school leaders. Our findings were also related to some contextual factors impacting teacher communication with pastoralist parents besides teacher education. This study highlighted the implications for teacher education and school policy. Potential directions for future research were recommended.

KEYWORDS:

• Pastoralist children
• teacher-parent communication
• caregiver
• teacher education
• ecological model

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to the anonymous reviewers and Dr. John David Campbell for their reviews and invaluable suggestions.

Ethics statement

The research was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Doctoral School of Education, University of Szeged. The consent forms were signed by all the participants and the interviews were recorded with the permission of the participants.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Civil Society Scholar Awards of the Open Society Foundations [IN2017-37074].

Notes on contributors

Batdulam Sukhbaatar

Dr. Sukhbaatar earned her PhD from University of Szeged and is a lecturer at Dornod University. She conducts research on parental involvement and teacher education.

Dr. Tarkó is a college professor and a head of the Institute of Applied Health Sciences and Health Promotion, Juhász Gyula Faculty of Education, University of Szeged. Her research focuses on minority studies and lifestyle.