The Foreign Service Journal, April 2017

72 APRIL 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL REFLECTIONS That Time I Was Acting Dean of a Mongolian University… BY N I COL E SCHAE F ER -MCDAN I E L I still remember my excitement when I first stumbled across the American University of Mongolia website in 2014. I had been searching for months for jobs inMongolia—our next home, thanks tomy husband’s work with the State Department Foreign Service—but had nothing to show for it yet. I wrote to AUMhopeful, never expecting such a tumultous work experi- ence. The university was founded in 2012 with the vision of establishing a liberal arts-focused American university inMon- golia. In collaboration with the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, AUMdeveloped an engineering curriculum, which students could enter after completing a “Bridge Pro- gram” that prepared them for undergradu- ate studies in English. Students would then study for two years inMongolia and two in Fairbanks. AUM received some funding fromUSAID, and its English Learning Institute was supported by U.S. govern- ment grants. The more I learned from afar, the more convinced I became of the virtues of AUM’s approach. I couldn’t wait to utilize my skills as a social scientist to support it. While I looked forward to the chaos often associated with start-up organizations, I was not entirely prepared for a request two weeks before arriving that I co-teach Nicole Schaefer-McDaniel holds a Ph.D. in environmental psychology and left academia when her husband, JohnMcDaniel, joined the Foreign Service in 2009. After assignments in São Paulo and Vienna, they currently serve in Ulaanbaatar. She teaches in the study abroad program of the School for International Training and continues to work with the Board of the American University of Mongolia to reopen the university. a math class in the inaugural program. “Teachmath?!” I thought frantically as I googled “pre-calculus” and “college algebra.” It turned out that our team included a Mongolian engineering professor, as well as an Americanmath professor lecturing from the United States via the internet. I was responsible for assuring that our ses- sions mirrored an American college class- room, that our teaching methods followed a student-centered approach, and that we spoke only in English. As I was to discover, however, one can never be sure what to expect inMongolia. Off the Beaten Path Known for its eternal blue skies, harsh winters (with temperatures below -30F) and nomadic culture, Mongolia’s size in relation to its sparse population is as overwhelming as its beauty. But daily life is not without its hard- ships: things don’t usually work as outsid- ers might expect them to, and the few resident expatriates quickly get used to vendors’ common refrain when asked for a desired product: “ baikh gui ”—no longer available. In Mongolia, things happen on their own terms: holidays are rescheduled with a few days’ notice, people may or may not show up for appointments, roads and stores close without any discernible logic, and businesses regularly run out of money. When I arrived in the capital, Ulaan- baatar (commonly called “UB” in Eng- lish), in 2015, I could see evidence of eco- nomic hardship everywhere: abandoned construction sites, empty restaurants, growing shantytowns known as “ger dis- tricts” (so named after the Mongolian felt tents— gers —residents pitch) and people collecting food or plastic bottles to sell. While the country has undergone many changes since the 1990 democratic revolution ended 70 years of socialism, reform of the educational system has lagged. Establishment of an institution like AUMwas a huge step forward. Among other things, AUMwas strikingly different from the traditional Soviet-style schools Mongolian students knew. Our eight students came from all walks of life, from country kids with extremely limited English skills to one who had com- pleted high school in the United States. It took one student three days to travel from his home in the far west of the country to UB. He had given up scholarships in Russia and Japan to stay in Mongolia, and was learning English as his fourth language. His determination and cheery demeanor never ceased to amaze me. Teaching and Learning One of my favorite moments occurred during a review session in which I intro- duced the idea of a “cheat sheet.” Used to learning by rote memorization, my Mongolian students had never thought about rewriting their notes or organizing the information in a way that made sense to them. When I showed themmy review sheet from a lecture my American counterpart