Canaries Reflect on the Mine

In Canaries Reflect on the Mine: Dropouts' Stories of Schooling Jeanne Cameron invites the reader to seeschooling and early school leaving through the eyes of high school dropouts themselves. The transcendentdesires revealed by this research - to be known and valued to learn with purpose and autonomy - are spokenwith poignant clarity by the young people who story these pages.This study offers a compelling and timely critique of the dominant neoliberal discourse on schooling and earlyschool leaving. It challenges conventional wisdom about dropouts and shows how the experiences and needsof those who leave school early and those who persist to graduation are more similar than different.Collectively these young people's stories evoke a canary-in-the-mine metaphor one where the canaries exitand the miners remain. They implore us to see the dropout crisis as a symptom of the alienating anddehumanizing school practices advanced by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. More importantlythey offer a vision for schooling that lovingly embraces and extends all students' experiences enriches theirbiographies and celebrates and supports each of their talents and purposes with equal passion.Pre-service and in-service teachers educational researchers and policy makers administrators and advocates for equitable and democratic schoolinghave much to learn from this book. Qualitative researchers will find a powerful model for working collaboratively with youth to represent theirexperiences and to craft solutions to the challenges they face. Students of sociology will discover a compelling illustration of C. Wright Mills'sociological imagination and his charge to take it big by drawing connections between individual biographies and the social and historical structuresthat frame lived experience. For professional social scientists it embodies Mills' challenge to embrace the moral sensibilities required to understandand improve the human condition.