CCR 691: Heath (1999) *Ways with Words*

Heath, Shirley Brice. Ways with Words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge: University Press, 1999.

Quick overview of Method:

· What and when: As described in her “Prologue,” Heath conducted ethnographic research during a time post-school-desegregation in the 1960s. Heath collaborated with numerous fellow teachers and graduate students on gathering and comparing recorded (field notes or audio tapes) and interpreted data of communication occurring in two populations during this time.

· Where: The sites she investigated were communities in the Piedmont Carolinas: one town consisting mostly of black farm families new to the working-class (Trackton) and one consisting mostly of long time working-class white folks (Roadville).

· How: Data consists of recorded communication occurring at school, at home, or at the textile mills, where most of the families from both towns work.

· Why: Based on their cross-cultural comparisons of communicative trends in Trackton and Roadville (both of children and teaching practices), the collaborating researchers worked to answer the following research question: “For each of these groups, what were the effects of the preschool home and community environment on the learning of those language structures and uses which were needed in classrooms and job settings” (4).

Some notes on Heath’s “strategies” for an ethnographic approach:

· 9 years! (1969-1978)

· Entered the community naturally, through acquaintances

· Acted as a participant-observer (did the work and knew and respected the town, the people, and the ways)

· Upfront with her focus: the physical boundaries, other communicative limitations, patterns of choice, and values associated within the socialization of language (5-6).

· Considers herself an anthropologist

· Acknowledges that her study is not a model for methods of other ethnographic research, admitting that it shouldn’t and likely won’t be replicated by other researchers (7-8).

· Defends her methodology by arguing that quantitative data approaches don’t account for social and cultural contexts (8).

· Acknowledges that participants “are the products of their history and current situation” and that her focus is on cultural, not racial, influences (10).

· Repeatedly refers to this account as a “narrative” or “story”

· Acknowledges that she affected the “social reality” of how classrooms were conducted at the time: “From ethnographer learning, or coming to ‘know,’ I have become ethnographer doing.”

· Acknowledges that these stories are incomplete (13)

· Conceals names of people and locations (13-14)

· Tries to capture the varying dialects as they naturally occur in speech (15)

Some questions/challenges/interesting topics:

1. I found great interest in Heath’s approach to being “responsible” to the community she researches, whether that be through the ways she entered the community, avoided generalized comparisons of race or socioeconomic status in her findings, used only equipment already accepted by the community (audio recorders), or sought to be respectful and considerate of her influence and presence at all times. Based on our conversations in class, I imagine others may have considered these acts of “responsibility” as answers to earlier calls for researchers to have the best interests for their participants when doing ethnography. Being “responsible” to our participants has been an unsettled issue for me all semester, though, since I suspect some of my research goals may not be perceived as well-intentioned (like when we wish to “infiltrate and assess” an institutional department, for example). I consider my aims to be aimed at positive action for some communities, but the actual community I seek to investigate may not see it that way. If our conclusions lead to arguments that our participants won’t be content with, I’m still unsure about how that complicates our responsibilities to our participants.

2. Heath acknowledges that “educators should not look here [in her book] for experiments, controlled conditions, and systematic score-keeping on the academic gains and losses of specific children. Nor should psycholinguisitics look here for data taped at periodic intervals under similar conditions over a predesignated period of time” (8-9). It’s hard not to respect her approach to using long term ethnographic participant-observation to make claims about how some individuals communicate. Still, having just read Chris Anson’s “The Intelligent Design of Writing Programs: Reliance on Belief or a Future of Evidence,” (where he argues that the discipline of college composition needs to perform research in the field that provides actual evidence, not just our own practical theories and story-telling) and based on our numerous conversations in 691 regarding our discipline’s call for evidence-driven research, I’m interested in thinking about how ethnography can be aligned with other methods to provide such results that Anson calls for. How might have Heath approached the study differently to accomplish this? How might we design a multi-method approach for our future ethnographic studies?