Changing views on childhood and children's rights entail an increasing demand for listening to children's voices, even in research. All children are, in principle, seen as vulnerable participants in research, but our concern is the particularly vulnerable children. By listening to them, researchers increase the chances of contributing to the improvement of the children's total situations based on their own experiences. In this article, after discussing why vulnerable children should take part in research and exemplifying how they should do it, we consider advice for enabling particularly vulnerable students' voices to be heard in research in ethically justifiable ways. Recommendations for considering vulnerable children's participation in research are proposed. While children may be regarded particularly vulnerable for a range of reasons, we draw attention to the student group in regular classes identified as having special educational needs by referring to examples from a recent research project in Norwegian schools.

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The aim of this article is to study how mothers of children with special needs understand themselves in educational contexts. Using the analytical concepts of positional identities and figured worlds, we study the different positionings of mothers as their children transition between different school levels. Data were collected through recursive interviews conducted over one year as part of a smallscale study of mothers with a high level of education. The data used in this article were obtained from an informant's reflections on her role as the mother of a child with special needs from the time he was in kindergarten to his final year in upper secondary school. Her case history illustrates how her positional identities in educational contexts were linked to mutual trust with the teachers and schools.The absence of trust had a significant impact on her ability to fully support her son's schooling.

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