This paper is a narrative exploration that began as an inductive approach to research Cremin’s notion of family as educator in the Mongolian family context. Through a series of conversation openers created by the Elbenwood Center for the Study of the Family as Educator, 14 Mongolians living in New York City, NY, USA and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia share their narratives of what education they learned from their families and outside of the formal classroom.
The scope of this paper is narrowed to that of grandparents’ educational viewpoints. From a micro-societal level, we learn that participants learned how to read and write, cook, husbandry, Mongolian history, how to play chess, and more from their grandparents. These skills provide utility for child development and in life itself.
This study exemplifies how narrative meaning-making is a medium for understanding the collective identity of memory, culture, and narratives (Wang, Song, Koh, 2017). The narratives also illustrate how the reproduction of memories and spaces influence the collective memory of a society (Zerubavel, 2003).
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