Learners conduct their activities in highly varied contexts and environments. In some cases, they are afforded opportunities to engage with highly skilled educators and with high quality resources that generate enriching educational experiences and that maximise their success. In other situations, by contrast and for a variety of reasons, learners encounter challenges that derive from their distinctive circumstances rather than from their learning capabilities, and sometimes those challenges prevent their success, despite their best efforts and often those of their teachers.

From this latter perspective, this book is focused on the phenomenon of researching within the educational margins. As we elaborate below, there are multiple potential approaches to conceptualising and constructing such margins, and to tracing their manifestations and effects. At the same time, these approaches have in common an attentiveness to the educational aspirations, experiences and outcomes of individuals and groups whose lives are variously different in particular ways from the sociocultural norms of the community majority, and/or who are subject to specific forms of marginalisation in comparison with mainstream community members. In some instances, these people are educational fringe dwellers , positioned as being “other” in relation to citizens with regular access to capital, power and status. This state of otherness or alterity may generate educational bias, and might impact on these fringe dwellers in multiple manifestations. In other cases, these people are educational border crossers , who mobilise opportunities to contest the ideological bases of their marginalisation and positioning, and who thereby engage in practices that can potentially enable and transform their situations, including through formal and informal learning.

The subsequent chapters in the book are concerned with the approaches taken by education researchers who work with these individuals and groups who are learning within these educational margins. In particular, the book investigates the diverse and specific education research methods and strategies that these researchers have developed and applied in order to ensure that their research is authentic, rigorous, situated and where possible empowering. These methods and strategies are located against the backdrop of increasing scrutiny of the conduct of researchers working with marginalised people, including in relation to the sets of protocols associated with gaining formal ethics approval and informed consent by participants in order for such research projects to take place. In view of this scrutiny, it is timely to examine and evaluate the effects and the effectiveness of the research methods and strategies deployed by education researchers who are working with variously marginalised individuals and groups.

A crucial element of researching within these educational margins is the capacity to communicate and articulate voices. These voices are recognised as being diverse and sometimes contradictory, reflecting as they do divergent worldviews and sometimes competing interests. In varied ways, the subsequent chapters highlight some of the complexities entailed in communicating and articulating voices in specific research projects, as well as strategies of proven effectiveness in achieving that communication and articulation.

This chapter consists of the following three sections:

Contemporary scholarly literature reflects increased interest in researching within the educational margins. Appropriately, such literature evinces considerable diversity in terms of paradigms, research questions and methods, findings and recommendations for action. Likewise, the subsequent chapters in this book demonstrate an equivalent diversity of focus and approach, while having in common an interest in understanding the circumstances of learners who inhabit the educational margins.

More broadly, yet equally appropriately, there is a considerable diversity evident in definitions and conceptualisations of marginalisation. One such definition was provided by Schiffer and Schatz (2008): “Marginalisation describes the position of individuals, groups or populations outside of ‘mainstream society’, living at the margins of those in the centre of power, of cultural dominance and economical and social welfare” (p. 6). A variation on this theme was afforded from a nursing perspective: “Marginalization is defined here as a process by which persons or groups are socio-politically peripheralized from dominant, central experiences, that is deprived of mobility, control over self will, and/or critical resources, indignified [sic] and humiliated” (Hall & Carlson, 2016). The feminist theorist bell hooks (2000) defined marginalisation even more succinctly: “To be in the margins is to be part of the whole bu...