Phyllida Coombes

Students, Staff and Academic Mobility in Higher Education

Review of Mike Byram and Fred Dervin (Eds.), Students, Staff and Academic Mobility in Higher Education (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle, 2008). Includes references.

Researching education with marginalized communities

Researching Education with Marginalised Communities brings together two important 21st century themes. The authors consider the what, where and why of marginalisation, that insidious phenomenon whereby certain groups of people are deemed inferior on the basis of factors that they cannot control. Through intensive and extensive research the book also explores the role of education research in enabling those involved, whether on the margin or at the centre, to achieve comprehensive awareness of marginalisation and to combine forces to combat the stigma of discrimination. The six groups of marginalised learners included in the book live in Australia, the UK, Continental Europe, Japan and Venezuela, and include mobile circus and fairground communities; teachers of Traveller children; pre-undergraduate university students; vocational education students with disabilities and their teachers; environmental lobbyists and policy makers; and retired people. All chapters explain how researching education with marginalised communities can be carried out effectively and ethically.

Constructing Knowledge with Marginalized Communities

This opening line from Charles Dickens’ famous novel, David Copperfield, first published in 1850, helps to make sense of the issues at stake in the ways in which knowledge is constructed about members of marginalized communities. David is reflecting on how the manner in which his life is written about shapes whether he will be perceived as the hero or central player in his life, or whether that role will be occupied by others. Such reflection is quite commonplace, in the sense that many people will ponder the extent to which they are free to choose and act out the directions of their lives against the influence of various social forces and structures that to a greater or lesser extent shape the kind of life that one has. Such structures include socio-economic factors, religion, education, gender, ethnicity and so forth.

Framing Marginalized Communities

This chapter describes and explores the effects of the complex interplay between the various frameworks and constructions of marginalization and those who are directly affected by the framing process. Attitudes and expectations emanating from these frameworks are analysed in relation to how education researchers may be able to embrace different and more inclusive methods of research. In particular, as a striking illustration of the argument pursued in the chapter, one example of an alternative means of engaging with Australian Indigenous vocational education and training (VET) students with a disability in Australia is examined. An action research project involving focus groups, observations and active participation was employed in a distinctive way, incorporating a successful interplay among vocational education, planning, a business focus and sponsorship. This project continues to provide relevant material for future research opportunities based around how more effectively to provide inclusive experiences for VET students and to avoid framing participants in negative and marginalizing ways.

Representing the Knowledge of Marginalized Communities

These words from Anne Elliot, the heroine of Jane Austen’s (1998) novel Persuasion, first published in 1818, spoken to a male companion, tell us something about the lives that men and women led during this period. And, although gender roles have dramatically changed throughout the Western world during the subsequent years, the fact that Austen’s books continue to resonate so strongly with female readers in particular suggests that her insights into women’s lives are still pertinent today.

Situating Education Research with Marginalized Communities

The world has been, is now and is likely always to be divided and unequal (Martens, Dreher, & Gaston, 2010; Watkins, 2009). This statement is a truism, but no less powerful and poignant for that. It provides both the impetus for this book and the backdrop against which this and the successive chapters have been written. It generates simultaneously seemingly insuperable challenges and potentially innovative and transformative responses to those challenges. And (perhaps most significantly from the perspective of the book) it mandates and warrants specific kinds of strategies by education researchers attempting to engage with the divided and unequal world that we all inhabit.

Researching Ethically and Responsibly with Marginalized Communities

Research is fraught with ethical dilemmas and sometimes with political consequences. In this chapter, we argue that a self-reflexive consideration of the ethical and political dimensions of research about and with marginalized communities (Basit, 2013), together with advocating research ethics as a set of instantiated institutional and individual practices, will enable researchers to conduct research that is ethically responsible and might even contribute to helping to transform these communities. This means that researchers need to be able to identify, and to be aware of and attentive to, these ethical and political dimensions in their interactions with research participants, and to understand how these issues might manifest themselves as potential risks to those participants. Thus the chapter investigates examples of ethical and political risks while education research is being undertaken with marginalized communities, as well as ways of reducing and managing those risks.

Writing and Publishing Research about Marginalized Communities

Previous chapters elaborated multiple possible approaches to designing and conducting research, constructing knowledge and representing the knowledge with and of members of marginalized communities. Building on that material, in this chapter we argue that, by being attentive to particular strategies of writing and publishing research, education researchers can avoid further marginalizing certain communities and, in fact, can sometimes contribute to breaking down the stigma of marginalization, or at least emphasize that from particular perspectives marginalization can be experienced and perceived as a positive state. This is premised, however, on also deploying the other strategies so far identified in this book, including how we name and frame our fellow research participants and how we design research projects in concert with them.

Evaluating Research Benefits for Marginalized Communities

Marginalization begins as an attitude. Where one group of people regards another group as outsiders, and when these outsiders, in general, agree with this assessment of themselves, marginalization exists. This is a complex situation and one that leads to many questions, theories, feelings and life choices. In simple terms, marginalization is based on binary opposites (Midgley, Tyler, Danaher, & Mander, 2011): self and others; us and them; insiders and outsiders; the centre and the edge. In sociological terms, these opposites are so familiar that we seldom question their accuracy or whether such terms are meaningful. Is the margin necessarily such a bad place? Might it truly be better to be living on the margins rather than in the centre? What harm might eventuate from this arbitrary labelling of communities according to these standards?

Designing and Conducting Research with Marginalized Communities

Justifying a particular method when designing and conducting research with vulnerable participant groups can be a challenging process owing in part to the methodological challenges related to issues such as deploying techniques for communicating abstract ideas to participants, enabling participants to express their views and finding ways for research to act responsively and inclusively (DeBlaere, Brewster, Sarkees, & Moradi, 2010; Reyes Cruz & Sonn, 2011). For example, Smyth and McInerney (2013) insisted that it is vital to acknowledge that ‘all researchers have interests, declared or otherwise’, and they proposed ‘the notion of advocacy ethnography’ as one approach to designing and conducting research ‘that is inclusive of the lives, perspective[s], experiences and viewpoints of the least powerful’. Similarly, Chilisa and Ntseane (2010) contended that, contrary to the researchers’ intentions, ‘the application of Western gender theory and policy in Botswana has tended to reduce women and girls’ experiences to the categories of “victim” and “other”’ (p. 617). From a different perspective, Ochieng (2010) cautioned that there are likely to be separate challenges arising from situations where researchers and participants are from the same ethnic background in striving to keep separate ‘their professional self and personal life experiences’ (p. 1725).