The Common Book in Social Justice
Education students enrolled in their first semester at Elizabethtown College will begin to explore the department’s social justice initiative through a common book selection. The department’s common read for 2020-2021 is Jeanne Cameron’s Canaries Reflect on the Mine: Dropouts’ Stories of Schooling (2012).
About the Book:
Readers see schooling and early school leaving through the eyes of high school dropouts themselves. Cameron’s work “challenges conventional wisdom about dropouts, and shows how the experiences and needs of 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 exit and the miners remain. They implore us to see the dropout crisis as a symptom of the alienating and dehumanizing school practices advanced by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. More importantly, they offer a vision for schooling that lovingly embraces and extends all students’ experiences, enriches their biographies, and celebrates and supports each of their talents and purposes with equal passion”. (IAP, 2017)
Winner of the 2013 AESA Critics Choice Awards, 2013 Outstanding Publication Award of the Narrative Research SIG of the American Educational Research Association, and The Society of Professors of Education 2013 Book Award. (IAP, 2017)