Family Involvement in Children’s Education and Health: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from Marginalised Communities

Submissions Open on 27th May 2026

Overview

Children’s health and well-being are fundamental to meaningful participation in education, sustained learning, and broader human development. Yet within international education and development, children’s health has often remained peripheral, despite its direct influence on school attendance, continuity, and outcomes. While scholarship has focused on enrolment, quality, and teacher development, less attention has been paid to the interconnected role of health as experienced within families and communities in marginalised contexts.

This special issue reframes children’s health as a central concern by foregrounding family involvement. Families are key actors mediating children’s access to education and health resources, particularly in low-income settings where formal systems are limited. Understanding how families navigate and support children’s learning and health across socio-cultural contexts is essential for advancing inclusive and equitable education.

Aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly Goals 3 and 4, this issue calls for interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral research bridging education, health, anthropology, and environmental studies. It encourages approaches that move beyond predominantly quantitative analyses to include qualitative, ethnographic, and mixed-methods perspectives.

In many parts of Asia and Africa, preventable illnesses such as malaria, diarrhoea, pneumonia, and malnutrition continue to affect children’s ability to attend school (UNICEF, 2021). The COVID-19 pandemic further exposed inequalities and underscored the need for locally grounded responses (WHO, 2021; UNESCO, 2022). However, existing frameworks often rely on Western paradigms and insufficiently reflect local knowledge and practices.

This special issue aims to advance research and policy by positioning children’s health within family and community life as foundational to educational equity. It seeks to promote empirically grounded, context-sensitive inquiry and to expand the conceptual and methodological boundaries of international education research.

List of topic area

We are interested in topics such as:

• Family roles in supporting children’s health and educational participation in marginalised communities
• Intersections of child health, school attendance, and learning continuity
• Community-based and culturally embedded health practices and their implications for education
• Parental knowledge, beliefs, and decision-making regarding child health and schooling
• Multidisciplinary approaches linking education, medicine, anthropology, and environmental studies
• School health programmes and family engagement in low-resource settings
• Impacts of poverty, gender, disability, and social exclusion on children’s health and education
• Children’s health and well-being in crisis contexts (e.g., pandemics, conflict, climate change)
• Environmental factors (e.g., water, sanitation, pollution) affecting child health and learning
• Indigenous knowledge systems and local health practices in relation to education
• Policy analysis on integrating health and education at local, national, and global levels
• Comparative and cross-national studies on family involvement in education and health
• Methodological innovations in researching children’s health and education (e.g., ethnography, participatory methods)
• The role of NGOs, community organisations, and international agencies in linking health and education
• Children’s health and educational equity in contexts of conflict and natural disasters

Timeline

Call Open: 27th May 2026

Submission open: 27th May 2026

Submission close: 31st August 2026

Submission information

• Papers should be up to 8,000 words, including the structured abstract and references. Please refer to this page for detailed submission guidelines under ‘Manuscript Requirements’.
• Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available here.
• Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e., in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to.”
• Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

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Guest Editor

Taeko Takayanagi, PhD., Professor (Nagasaki University, Japan)

Professor Taeko Takayanagi specialises in international education and development, with a particular focus on informal learning, non-formal learning, and literacy in marginalised communities across Asia and Africa. Her research adopts interdisciplinary and qualitative approaches, drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Maasai communities in Kenya, Karen communities in northern Thailand, and persons with disabilities and their families in Pakistan. Through these contexts, she examines how learning, literacy practices, and community knowledge are shaped within everyday life.

Her recent work is further informed by the concept of planetary health, exploring how environmental conditions, community well-being, and sustainable livelihoods influence learning processes in diverse socio-ecological settings. By situating education within broader ecological and social systems, her research highlights the interconnectedness of human well-being, local knowledge/wisdom, and sustainable development.

She has extensive experience in international collaboration, including projects supported by JSPS and partnerships with organisations such as JICA,UNESCO and NGOs, contributing to policy and practice in inclusive and equitable education. Her work also examines the role of family and community engagement in shaping learning processes, particularly in low-resource and culturally diverse settings. Through her research and teaching, she aims to advance multidisciplinary perspectives that position informal and non-formal learning as central to sustainable development and educational equity.