This dissertation is a collection of three separate but interrelated essays exploring the overarching topic of marginalization and education internationally. Across the essays a combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques are used to analyze marginalization and education for different student populations in different international contexts. In terms of the different marginalized populations that are studied, the first and third essays focus on disability while the second essay examines gender, socioeconomic status, home language, and immigrant status. Geographically, the first essay has the broadest focus at the global level, while the second and third essays focus on select countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The first essay analyzes the presence and representation of disability in mainstream international education development discourse. Discourse analysis is used to systematically examine the attention that is paid to disability as a form of marginalization and the way disability is linguistically situated in recent international development strategy documents. Three documents produced by agencies that play a major role in international education development were purposefully sampled and analyzed, namely the World Bank, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the Brookings Institute. The second essay analyzes the relationships between multiple categories of marginalization, feelings of belongingness, and academic achievement across three sub-Saharan African countries using 8th-grade data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science, 2011 (TIMSS, 2011). Specifically, marginalization on the basis of one’s gender, socioeconomic status, home language, and immigrant status is examined in Botswana, Ghana, and South Africa. A central component of the analysis involves investigating whether feelings of belongingness buffer the negative impact that marginalization can have on academic achievement in mathematics and science. The third essay explores how the national inclusive education policy reform process for students with disabilities has been shaped by global and local forces in Tanzania. I investigate the perspectives and experiences of national policy actors working in the government, non-governmental organizations and universities by conducting semi-structured interviews in Dar es Salaam. My analysis focuses on understanding the appropriation of inclusive education policy in an effort to demystify the policy process and emphasize the agency of global and local actors. Together, these three essays contribute to literature on marginalization in education at global and local levels. Individually, each essay offers a unique contribution by having different foci within the larger topic of marginalization and education internationally. While the first essay focuses on the presence and representation of a marginalized group within international education discourse, the second focuses on the academic performance of marginalized groups, and the third on educational policy for a marginalized group. In addition, the individual contribution of each essay is further enhanced by the diversity of research approaches that are used across the essays, including document analysis, quantitative secondary data analysis and qualitative research methods. The diversity of research approaches and range of subtopics explored within this dissertation enables each essay to provide a unique perspective on the presence, performance, and policy of particular marginalized student groups, while at the same time speaking to the larger issue of marginalization in education internationally.
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