Participants

In this section I discuss the choice of my research participants at UIS, in Lao PDR and Mongolia but also how I expanded my pool of interviewees as I faced various challenges during fieldwork.

The most obvious research participants were all those involved in LAMP at UIS and all those who were part of the LAMP teams in Lao PDR and Mongolia. This is not simply an obvious choice, but also a selection of the people who would have some knowledge of the Programme. In Lao PDR (especially) and Mongolia there was very little knowledge of LAMP beyond the LAMP teams involved in the implementation of LAMP.

The LAMP International Planning Report establishes that each country must establish a LAMP team, which is a small group of experts put together by the local LAMP coordinating institutions (according to the guidelines LAMP should be implemented by collaborating institutions and not only one). The LAMP team includes a national project leader, literacy experts, a survey statistician, a data collection expert, a survey processing specialist, a linguist and a data analyst.

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In total I interviewed twenty nine people involved in LAMP. My interviews were extensive and in depth, and I would describe my role as a participant observer of the process which the interviews focused on.

Firstly, I interviewed staff from the UIS LAMP team in Montreal. I spent one month analysing LAMP documents and interviewing the LAMP team at UIS. Staff were willing not only to share stories and give me extensive interviews but also share all LAMP documents and correspondence with me97.

The second stage of my data generating took place in Lao PDR. Here only the leader of the Lao LAMP team had been appointed. The rest of the Lao LAMP team had not been formed yet, meaning that my interview sampling in Lao PDR required rethinking.

The Lao LAMP team leader gave me two lengthy interviews and was very supportive of my research, giving me contacts and phoning ministerial staff for me, but this only gave me access to a couple of ministerial policy actors. I found myself having to re-sample my research participants and through fortunate networking, I interviewed high level policy actors at the Ministry of Education in the Department for Policy and Planning, the Department for Non- Formal Education and the Division for Statistics. I thus managed to interview five highly influential policy makers involved with literacy assessment and policy planning, who all gave me extensive interviews.

Further to these interviews, I had the opportunity to spend two full weeks with a key policy maker from the Ministry of Education travelling (this required written permission from the Ministry of Education for me to be an MoE mission guest) with international development partners to evaluate literacy and community learning centre programmes. Both weeks allowed for observations but also for extensive, insightful conversations with both ministerial staff and practioners who had been working in Lao PDR as foreign experts for many years.

Though my conversations with the government policy actors were rich, I worried I was not managing to collect sufficient data, simply because there were no other people in the Ministry

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Most of my time at UIS was spent reading the guideli nes (seven big folders) of the Programme, the test instruments, past correspondence by country from the beginning of LAMP to 2012, and any other information the LAMP team thought I should read. I was given unexpected access to anything I asked to read and my search for documents was facilitated in all ways.

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who were involved in LAMP. It is for this reason that I also met up with the foreign advisors at the Ministry of Education working in the Policy Planning Department and Ministry of Education’s international development partners to gain other perspectives of the Lao educational trends (even though few of the international development partners were aware of LAMP, also the case in Mongolia where the Programme has been implemented for ten years). The international development partner I was most in contact with was the German educational development agency, dvv international, which focuses exclusively on adult education and literacy. At the time of my visit, dvv international was in the process of re-writing the NFE policy in close collaboration with the Ministry of Education NFE Department. Other organizations I gained insights from were Room to Read, World Concern-Lao PDR, and Welthungerhilfe (German agricultural development agency). I was also invited to attend two ESWG (Education Sector Working Group) meetings which are working groups of representatives from the Ministry of Education and development partners (like UNESCO, UNICEF, ADB, WB, etc.) who work closely with the Ministry of Education in all areas of educational development.

Following my Lao PDR sampling experience, I approached my Mongolian data gathering process with a revised list of research participants. Within the LAMP team I met with the leader, the coordinator, the manager of the Programme, four data experts, and the statistician based in the Mongolian National Institute of Statistics. Although these interviewees were all part of the LAMP team, they also had other high level roles in the government ministries or institutes.

Following my experience in Lao PDR, I was also keen to speak to people covering similar roles in Mongolia as those I had met with in Lao PDR. I thus interviewed a senior member of the Ministry of Education, who was indicated as the person to talk to about statistics in education for policy, a senior member of the Ministry of Education who was responsible for policy planning and was working on the newly elected government’s educational policy, and the head of the Non-Formal Education Centre (equivalent to the Lao’s Department of NFE).

Also drawing on my Lao experience, I felt that by talking to local and international organizations I would gain further insights. I thus met with two local organizations98 (the

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Mongolian Educational Alliance and World Vision), with UNICEF and the World Bank (the latter highly involved in international assessments in Mongolia).

In Mongolia, I did not have the opportunity to go on missions with the Ministry of Education, but I did travel with the LAMP coordinator to an aimag centre (a province centre not far from the capital city) where I met with the aimag head of NFE for an overview of NFE in Mongolia over the last thirty years99, and to visit a primary and secondary school in the poor yurt suburbs of the capital city Ulaanbaatar where I met with the school director to talk about the formal school system (both of these visits were organized by interviewees who were kindly ‘trying to help me’).

I also had the opportunity to attend a two-day conference on educational policy in Mongolia organized by the Asian Development Bank and Teachers College (TC) - Columbia University. This conference not only gave me the opportunity to meet many people involved in education and policy in Mongolia, including many of my interviewees (in most cases I was introduced by Professor Gita Steiner-Khamsi from Teachers College) but also to hear the newly appointed Minister of Education, Gantumur Luvsannym (Гантөмөр Лувсаннямын) speak about his vision for education. At this meeting, Professor Steiner-Khamsi also provided me the opportunity to take part in a meeting between ADB and high level Mongolian educationalists and other international development partners. This proved to be an insightful meeting, especially since Mongolia’s involvement in international assessments was discussed.

Further to the research settings and participants described here above, I also met with a UNESCO consultant in Bangkok (UNESCO’s regional Bureau) who was the local LAMP consultant for UIS in the Asian region. Although he had not worked closely with the Mongolian LAMP team100, he was working very closely with the Lao LAMP coordinator. At the time of my stop-over in Bangkok and interview, the local LAMP consultant said he had been working on the draft ‘National Planning Report’ (see next paragraph) with the Lao LAMP coordinator and that he was due to receive it ‘any day soon’ (although he did not receive the report in the six following weeks when I was in Lao PDR). I also Skyped with a consultant who had been responsible for LAMP in Vietnam (in the UNESCO local office) as I hoped it would provide me

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The number of years she had been working in NFE.

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Mongolia has closer relationships with the UNESCO Beijing Office – though it was not involved in the implementation of LAMP.

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with regional insights; and in Paris I met with a UNESCO member of staff who had first worked on LAMP in its early days at UIS and then worked in Lao PDR on the ‘Lao National Literacy Survey’ (a national assessment carried out in 2001 with the support of UNICEF and UNESCO), as I valued his perspectives from the centre of calculation (UIS) but also the periphery (Lao PDR).