For Buriat focal children, school culture differed in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China, from that in Ulan Ude, Buriatia. Some children refused to conform to the broader norms established by the school and with the expectations, conscious or unconscious, their teachers had for them as students. Firstly, in contrast to their Chinese peers, who passively accepted the workload, Buriat children did not like the long hours of classroom study and massive amounts of homework. They complained to me vehemently about assignments, and said “at home” (Buriatia) they had time to “play.” Likewise, Buriat parents did not, like Chinese parents, socialize their children to work as hard and compete as keenly with their Chinese classmates. Certainly, Buriat parents expected their children to do well at school, but they also wanted their children to think widely; “My son should read Tolstoy, and ride his bike, and go home (during holidays) to see his family…this Chinese system is too harsh on children,” said Bata-Nimah’s father. Buriat parents socialize their children to respect the earth and play outside in nature. In Hohhot, an urban city of three million, Buriat children had little access to nature.
Second, Buriat children did not like the authority structure in the bilingual school. Students in Buriatia, like students in China, viewed teachers as authorities, who fed them information, but Buriat students also viewed their teachers as accessible. “In Ulan Ude, we could see our teacher as a person, and knew she liked us. Here we are just taking up space, competing with the others,” Mergen said. This sense of being invalid, “just taking up space” made the Buriat children unenthusiastic. They also lacked genuine chances for student-initiated responses. “We are supposed to be quiet, and not make trouble. The teacher is always yelling at us and telling us how bad we are,” said Bata-Nimah. He also reported that he was able to “chat” with his teacher on the playground in his Russian school and that he felt “more comfortable” around his “Russian teachers” back home than his “Chinese teachers” in Hohhot.
Russian schools in Buriatia and elsewhere in Russia, from primary through university, are noted for their mobility and chaos. Hudgins (2003:252) reports that, from primary through university levels, “constant chatter” occurred. Unstructured social interaction between students is now expected and allowed in Russia. In Buriatia, teachers (ethnic Buriats and ethnic Russians) told me that they expected the students to get up, to talk, and to confer individually with me and with others during certain class times. These Buriat teachers had smaller classes (20–25 students) but like the Chinese they understood classroom discipline, time management, rules, rituals, and procedures. The difference laid in the teacher’s visions; “We want creativity, not soldiers,” said Ayuna, a Buriat teacher in Ulan Ude.
In Hohhot, Dasha remarked, “I hate sitting, being quiet; it’s stupid. It’s boring.” The two Buriat boys rarely whispered or talked in class, while their Outer Mongolian classmates had a rising noise level. This angered the Inner Mongolian teachers, who would shout: “Be quiet! Have respect!” While Inner Mongolian students told me they “liked” to act as one unit, shouting out answers chorally, Buriat students told me they did not like to respond chorally. In Buriatia, they had raised their hands to volunteer to speak, and they wished to speak and to be assessed as individuals. Differences in relations of power between student and teacher also upset the Buriats; “We have no rights here; we can’t ask questions, and they treat us (students) as a herd of sheep,” said Mergen. “We don’t think, we just recite, baa baa baa, as one large group.”
Although Russian classes, after kindergarten, do not encourage as much group work, team activities, or communicative language learning as American schools, nevertheless, teachers can and do utilize these teaching methods to some extent (Holmes et al. 1995). For example, I observed as Buriat teachers asked open questions to individual students; “This dialogue allows creativity, and allows students to choose good partners for pair and group work,” said Valentina Vasilyevna, a retired master teacher in Ulan Ude. Surana, who attended the Chinese track but left within three months, said: “My class at home (in Ulan Ude) has 24 students. We do stand to greet our teacher, and I stand to answer questions, but it’s different. It’s respect (standing up), not the army, you know. And it’s my answer.” This child also confirmed that in Ulan Ude she could chat with her friends during class, and choose to get out of her seat at times. She also had cordial interactions with her Russian teachers; Surana took me to visit Valentina Vasilyevna in her home.
Currently, teachers in Russia cannot use corporal punishment (Holmes et al. 1995), but in the Mongolian track classes where Dasha sat, Inner Mongolian teachers held pointers, which they used to rap on students’ hands. In the Chinese track, I saw a teacher pick up a notebook and lightly slap a student on the side of his head. This was not acceptable to the Buriats; “If she dares to touch me, I’ll slug her,” Dasha, told me, regarding corporal punishment. Zhargal, (aged 15) another Buriat participant who had recently graduated from the school, added: “They cannot hit us in school (in Buriatia); it is against Russian law. No one ever hit me in primary or secondary school. My mother said, in Soviet times, they did that, but not after 1991.”
Peer interactions were also problematic. For example, Inner Mongolian students blatantly rejected Dasha for her non-conformance and non-participation by ignoring and ridiculing her. Her peers told me she was “a bad student.” Dasha, identifying herself as “half Russian and half Buriat,” said: “They always called me fatty foreigner. I hated going to school. I hate the Chinese.” However, when chatting at the school gates with an Inner Mongolian mother whose child was in this class, she said: “In China, the class is considered as a group; all the marks are averaged together. If one child refuses or cannot do well, other children will resent her, even act mean. She (Dasha) is not only a foreigner, different, but also lazy. She holds her group back.”
A third issue is that Russian schools are no longer highly focused on patriotic education (Holmes et al. 1995), while Chinese school socialization continues to stress loyalty to the government. Some Russian educators worry about this loss while others rejoice in turning more toward European standards (Griswold 2007). On the exercise yard, I watched Buriats mock the Chinese patriotic rituals, especially during the daily mid-morning break, when all students marched out to the field, staying in class formation and performing standardized exercises in time to music and patriotic slogans blaring from microphones. Their teachers strolled up and down their students’ lines, watching them and making sure that they did their exercises. Sometimes teachers yelled at a student, or cuffed him to get him in line. This type of physical exercise differed from what Buriat children experienced in Buriatia, where out of class they could approach and hold more authentic dialogues with their teachers, and where they could choose whether to exercise or not during the morning exercises. “We did what we wanted at home; played volleyball, or basketball, or just smoked and chatted,” Mergen, said, adding: “Marching is for soldiers.”