Book Review: D. Jean Clandinin, Pam Steeves, Vera Caine, Composing Lives in Transition: A Narrative Inquiry into the Experiences of Early School Leavers (KEY IJP************258)

• Satendra Kumar Singh

Abstract

The narrative accounts of eleven early school dropouts are discussed in this book. D. Jean Clandinin, Pam Steeves, and Vera Caine wrote the piece of literature. The book is broken up into seventeen segments. The author employs an intriguing technique that includes literature reviews, open-ended structured interviews, and snowball sampling, among other things. This qualitative study provides a better and more comprehensive understanding of the circumstances to analyse why people leave school early. This study uniquely includes studentsopinions about their reasons for dropping out. This book illustrates how studentsdiverse identities, cultural origins, and hobbies greatly influence their behaviour. Most people think that students who abandon their studies during school are dropouts, yet this is a minimal definition of quitting education. Writers claim that dropout words only display numerical data. The history behind a student's decision to drop out of school is never given. A poor education is detrimental to the social fabric as it makes it difficult to obtain employment, which also affects the economy. Various researchers, including educators and academics, have contributed to this study. The province of Alberta in western Canada serves as the study's base. The experiences of early school leavers and how their identity is shaped as such are conceptualised in this study. This study investigates how early school leaversinstitutional environments are shaped by their many cultural, familial, and social identities. Numerous schools have participated in this study, and researchers have gathered data from narrative inquiry projects. This research reveals the distinction between institutional knowledge and first-person narratives of early school dropouts. This study differs from previous stereotype-based research that was conducted. These studies essentially depict the limited scenario of dropout rates. Still, this book is quite different since it gives studentsbehavioural points of view on their early school abandonment, and the narrative inquiry presents a unique scenario.