Book Review of Farrell (1990)
Brief presentation slides can be viewed here.
In his ground-breaking book Hanging in and dropping out: Voices of at-risk high school students (1990) published by Teachers College Press, Edwin Farrell, a professor at the City College in New York, examines at-risk high school students’ school experiences through a unique data collection and analysis approach of involving “collaborators” who are themselves at-risk students to interview other at-risk students and friends who have already dropped out of school. The study described in the book evolves from a cooperative Stay-in-School Partnership program at the City College. The collected data of tape interviews and the accompanying analyses conducted by the author and his collaborators incorporate a framework of “competing selves” developed beyond Erik Erikson’s Childhood and society (1963) theory where Erickson asserts “ego is a central principle of organization within the individual; it must integrate growth with the structure of social institutions” (p. 3), and adolescence is the formative stage of integrating multiple identities. The author categorizes at-risk students’ identities (e.g., the career self, the sexual self, self among peers, the family self, and self as parent) conflicting with their school identity – “self-as-student”. The dialogues of these students suggest that the group of students’ inability to keep a harmony between their multiple selves and their “self-as-student” become the overarching problem that accounts for the dropout phenomenon. The data also present a conflict between the “meaning systems” of students and those of teachers in the 1990s. The author concludes with a call for more learning opportunities created for at-risk students in a real-world context.
