Marching is for soldiers: Russian-born Buriat children in a Chinese bilingual school

Valerie Sartor

doi:10.1186/s13616-015-0025-6

Abstract

This ethnographic study examines the educational struggles of Russian-born Buriat Mongolian children studying in China at a Mongolian/Mandarin school, by emphasizing conflicting educational paradigms between the Russian and Chinese systems. Educational practices are compared. Standardized assessment, teacher-centered classrooms, and group- oriented values, all reflected Han-Chinese ideology, but conflicted with Russian educational norms and Russian/Buriat values, causing young Buriat students to resist.

Highlights

In early 2005 I moved to Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China, to teach college-level English
As little research on indigenous educational practices has been conducted in China (Tsung 2009), this school site in Chinese Mongolia offers a unique sociocultural and sociohistorical ethnographic study addressing language education for multilingual nonmainstream Buriat Mongolian youth
In recent centuries the Buriats, like other Mongolians, have been politically, economically, and socially oppressed. Their homelands, their freedom to migrate and migration routes, are currently defined and controlled by Russia and China. This ethnographic study resembles that of Crago et al (1993) and Phillips (1983), who explored how indigenous students attempted to learn in classrooms where the communicative practices they learned from their caregivers, as well as their indigenous mother tongue, differed from the school’s

Summary

Introduction

In early 2005 I moved to Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China, to teach college-level English. Via ethnographic methods, I examine some of the complexities and tensions young Buriat students from Buriatia, Russian Federation, encountered at the research site, a Chinese bilingual combined primary/secondary school in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia. As little research on indigenous educational practices has been conducted in China (Tsung 2009), this school site in Chinese Mongolia offers a unique sociocultural and sociohistorical ethnographic study addressing language education for multilingual nonmainstream Buriat Mongolian youth. After hundreds of hours in different settings (school, homes, public gatherings, etc.) with participants, young and old, in China and in Buriatia, I began to understand how the focal children’s communicative actions and social reality were connected to people in the past and to historical events, in the context of time and space, per a sociocultural framework utilizing Voloshinov and Bakhtin (1973; Bakhtin 1981).

Ethnicity Mixed race Buriat Buriat Buriat Buriat

Findings

Conclusion