Shirley Brice Heath’s Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms – Part 5
Heath poses the question, “Of what use might the detailed ethnographies of communication in Roadville and Trackton be in enabling teachers and students to bridge their different ways?” (p. 265). She continues, “The answer to this question depends on finding ways to make accessible to teachers an understanding of the differences in language and culture their students bring to their classroom” (p. 265).
In this respect, Heath discusses some of the challenges faced by teachers, such as black and white teachers meeting “[f]or the first time in the South” in the “university classrooms and regional workshops to discuss ways to improve their teaching methods and materials,” “desegregation,” and working with black and white students that “showed no improvement in the basic classes” (p. 265-67).
Heath displays “teachers’ evaluations of working-class students having discipline and academic problems,” detailing the different behaviors between whites and blacks “in their earliest desegregated classrooms” (pp. 268-69). The picture that these evaluations paint portrayed the unruliness, disrespectful, and unwillingness of black schoolchildren to listen in the classroom. White schoolchildren were described as being quiet, individualistic, and attentive (pp. 268-69).
There was also a difference between preschool children in Roadville and Trackton, especially in following rules and a schedule and play (pp. 274-75). Essentially, children from both communities showed an interest to apply some aspects of their home life in the classroom particularly during play time (pp. 274-76).
While there were “verbal differences … between the children of the Roadville- and Trackton-like communities, and between their mainstream teachers,” the majority “of these formal differences among the dialects caused relatively little difficulty in communication” (pp. 276-79). Heath states, “More troublesome were differences in the uses of language the children brought to school, a topic rarely discussed in the research literature” (p. 278).
Teachers in Roadville and Trackton tried different approaches in terms of discipline and setting rules in the classroom (pp. 279-81). Mainstream teachers “felt that, ideally, children should come to school knowing many or all of the usual verbal routines of politeness, but after integration, teachers at all levels of the curriculum complained that manners and respect were appallingly absent in their students’ behavior” (p. 279). Essentially, “[t]eachers tried instead indirect instruction and modeling for the children” (p. 280).
Heath states, “Both Roadville and Trackton children had difficulty interpreting these indirect requests for adherence to an unstated set of rules” (p. 280). The preschool children in Roadville understood and respected “space-function ties,” such as when playtime ended, where toys were stored, and that it was “adults setting the rules,” but they struggled when “in small-group activities, when no adult was around, they negotiated among themselves in loud and boisterous ways” that involved arguing over toys and then “skulking when the teacher intervened before the ‘score’ was settled between two children” (p. 280).
Trackton children struggled with “space-function ties or time-task ties, and many were exceedingly frustrated in the first months of preschool when it seemed to them that once they had collected the items they wanted and started a task, the teacher intervened, either to remind them to take [the] objects back to their place or move on to another activity” (p 280).
Some of the teachers in Roadville and Trackton-like towns adapted their methods to fit their students’ upbringing and how they learned (pp. 282-89). Heath says, “Many of these teachers’ ideas for building school skills on home skills and ways of talking were simply imaginative, intuitive teaching strategies. But many were also backed by science theory and descriptive facts about their own and their students’ backgrounds and the use of oral and written language in different communities” (p. 292).
In terms of fictive and nonfictive stories told by Roadville and Trackton children, various “traits” were valued while others were not (pp. 295-96). For instance, in Roadville classrooms, children were encouraged to “[summarize a nonfictive] story with [a] moral,” whereas children in Trackton schools “evaluated” nonfictive stories (p. 295).
The “interactional” aspects of storytelling in Roadville schools included audience participation in the sense that adults requested a story, and an audience “directly [evaluated]” stories, which also entailed questioning “elements of [a] story” (p. 295). From an instructional perspective, “[a]dults [preconceived a] story, and [structured] it through question” (p. 295).
Heath states, “In the Piedmont region in the 1970s there was a strong push toward making vocational skills available in the public schools, and an increasing number of language arts and reading teachers tried to determine their role in preparing students who were headed for jobs in the textile mills, or as construction workers, mechanics, nursing assistants, and food services workers” (p. 311).
Essentially, her “ethnographic work in Roadville and Trackton had revealed that there were few situations in which adults individually wrote extended prose, and that patterns of individual and group reading varied greatly across communities” (p. 312). She also discovered that the kind of writing done in the “social networks of the students,” which involved “posting protest messages” in recreational centers, “advertisements for parts of cars and musical instruments,” and “calls for participation in local sports or musical events,” mostly “consisted of short passages or phrases” (p. 312).
Heath introduced the concept of ethnography, the “methods of an ethnographer,” to a “fifth-grade science class in 1974” that “was made up almost entirely of black boys who were reading at [a] second-grade level or below; their class was designated the lowest track of science in their grade” (p. 316-17). She encouraged the students to use an ethnographic approach in order “to answer questions about foodstuffs, how to grow them, and how to prepare them for eating” (p. 317).
By the end of the lesson, the students had created their own “‘book’ written by the class” (p. 319). The students “had learned some of the vocabulary of ethnographic fieldwork: interview, bias, folk culture, artifact, life history, etc.; as well as terms such as photosynthesis, chlorophyll, osmosis, pesticide” (p. 319-20). Students also “had improved their knowledge of science” as well as “had learned to talk about ways of obtaining and verifying information; terms such as sources, check out (in the sense of verify), summarize, and translate [which] had become part of their vocabulary” (p. 320).
An important element students engaged in was the “translation process,” which required them to translate common knowledge held within the community, using that knowledge to develop a more complete understanding of it within a larger scientific context portrayed within science textbooks (pp. 322-23).
The translation process consisted of three steps. The students first “[learned] skills for collecting and reporting such knowledge; the second step was engaging collectively in a process of translating this knowledge into the format and categories of the unfamiliar domain. The end result was realization by students that participation in both domains [was] viable for the individual, and features of one domain can be used in the other” (p. 324).
In this kind of learning environment, which favored a social constructivist approach, students learned together with the teacher acting as a facilitator (p. 324). Heath says, “Particularly important in this classroom were: 1) the emphasis on the role of imitation and guidance, and 2) absence of reliance on individual learning” (p. 327).
“Teachers introduced the idea of keeping journals” in junior and high school classes (p. 334). Some of the reasons to keep a journal included autobiographical, “to help students handle their daily buying and selling needs,” and for analyzing films and the arguments of the individuals presented in them (p. 338). This approach to teaching writing is representative of Expressivism (i.e. where the process of writing is the focus) and Cognitivism (i.e. in which the process of writing is important, but with a distinct focus on the goals of the writer) within the field of rhetoric and composition.
Heath mentions the “ethnic revival movements of the 1970s” that sought to “collect folk songs, tales, and music from ethnic communities for incorporation into classroom routines and published materials,” but the teachers focus on purpose “on the collection of cultural materials from an ethnic perspective” in the Piedmont region was different (pp.339-40).
The teachers had other goals, which included: 1) to provide a foundation of familiar knowledge to serve as context for classroom information; 2) to engage students in collecting and analyzing familiar ways of knowing and translating these into scientific or school-accepted labels, concepts, and generalizations; and 3) to provide students with meaningful opportunities to learn ways of talking about using language to organize and express information” (p. 340).
In her “Epilogue,” Heath states that “three general points stand out” in regards to how Roadville and Trackton socialize their children:
1) “[P]atterns of language use in any community [were] in accord with and mutually [reinforced] other cultural patterns, such as space and time orderings, problem-solving techniques, group loyalties, and preferred patterns of recreation. In each of these communities, space and time usage and the role of the individual in the community condition the interactional rules for occasions of language use” (p. 344).
2) “[F]actors involved in preparing children for school-oriented, mainstream success [were] deeper than differences in formal structures of language, amount of parent-child interaction, and the like. The language socialization process in all its complexity [was] more powerful than such single-factor explanations in accounting for academic success” (p. 344).
3) “[T]he patterns of interactions between oral and written uses of language [were] varied and complex, and the traditional oral-literate dichotomy [did] not capture the ways other cultural patterns in each community [affected] the uses of oral and written language. In the communities described here, occasions for writing and reading of extended prose [occurred] far less frequently than occasions for extended oral discourse around written materials” (p. 344).
While some of the teachers revealed “[i]n a series of interviews held in late 1981” that the “ethnographic methods were very effective as tools for discovering the language use of patterns of communities served by the school,” as well as had “benefited them [and their students] academically and socially,” they were “quick to point out that both the crises in education and the structures of schools [were] radically different in the 1980s” (p. 356).
According to Heath, the new crisis was a “‘lack of faith in schools,’ and the response [had] been a decrease in the autonomy of teachers as competent professionals and an increase in the bureaucratization of teaching and testing” (p. 356).
Reflecting on Heaths’ presence in the two communities, the teachers “pointed to the catalytic effect [her] presence in the communities and schools had for their behavior and attitude changes” (p. 357). In this sense, Heath had been someone “outside of the ‘system’” they could commutate their frustrations” (p. 357).
During her time within the Trackton and Roadville communities, Heath had maintained the role of etic (as a member of an outside group) and emic (as a member of an inside group) researcher, which helped her to gain the trust of the residents by living among them as well as their respect as someone providing an objective lens in which to view their daily lives (pp. 359-60).
Heath closes, “The story of this book gives a single example of how such changes can come about. The challenge of a structural change imposed by law, in conjunction with community confidence in teachers and schools, and the availability of applicable social science training, led to pedagogical innovations that were effective at least on a small scale” (p. 269).
Heath follows up with a new epilogue in the 1996 reprinted edition. She discusses how “international and national economic forces” have started to affect men and women within the region (p. 371).
She also talks how these changes have affected the families in the region due to the new demands placed on them because the continued sprawl of urbanization and advancements in technology have further added to the evolution of the nuclear family. Heath mentions the challenges facing “the ethnographer of communication who lives by the research charge to participate in natural intertwining flows of language and action now has to depend primarily on listening, observing, and asking questions of these age- and gender-segregated scattered groups” (pp.371-72).
Heath explains how “family or community members [had once] ate or enjoyed entertainment, they usually had a hand in the work of planning and preparing,” but now “talk by children and youths tends to center around current social dynamics, responses to entertainment that comes through technology, and events that happened to them or their friends in the immediate past” (p. 372).
In this sense, “ethnographers must learn patterns of affiliation in numerous networks of different spaces and times, follow modes of physical transport and learn where youths meet, and delineate technological means and sources of communication” (p. 372).
The “bridging metaphor” between classrooms and communities remains “viable” within the region, “but the span of the bridge and the vehicles that cross it will differ” (p. 376).
“Community youth organizations” must now be included as well as part of the equation (p. 376). Heath says, “Exploring creatively the need for social connectedness of institutions, such as schools and youth organizations, as well as workplace, offers us ways to create and tell new stories” (p. 376).
References and further readings
Bizzell, P. (1982). “Cognition, convention, and certainty: What we need to know about writing.” PRE/TEXT, 3.3. pp. 213–43.
Coles, Jr., W.E. (1967). “The teaching of writing as writing.” College English, 29.2. pp. 111–16.
Delpit, L. (1995). Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York: The New Press.
Dundes, A. (1962), “From etic to emic units in the structural study of folktales.” Journal of American folklore, 75, No. 296. pp. 95–105, doi:10.2307/538171, JSTOR i223629
Elbow, P. (1987). “Closing my eyes as I speak: An argument for ignoring audience.” College English, 49.1. pp. 50–69.
Emic and etic standpoints for the description of behavior, chapter 2 in Language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behavior, vol 2, by Kenneth Pike (published in 1954 by Summer Institute of Linguistics). https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015004829167;view=1up;seq=22
Flower, L. and Hayes, J.R. (1981). “A cognitive process theory of writing.” College composition and communication, 32.4. pp. 365–87.
Goodenough, W. (1970). “Describing a culture.” Description and comparison in cultural anthropology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 104–119, ISBN 978-0-202-30861-6.
Hairston, M. (1982). “The winds of change: Thomas Kuhn and the revolution in the teaching of writing.” College composition and communication, 33.1. pp.76–88.
Headland, T., Pike, K., and Harris, M.(eds). (1990). Emics and etics: The insider/outsider debate. Sage.
Heath, S.B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Jardine, N. (2004). “Etics and emics (not to mention anemics and emetics) in the history of the sciences.” History of science, 42. pp. 261–78.
Kottak, C. (2006). Mirror for humanity (p. 47). McGraw-Hill, New York. ISBN 978-0-07-803490-9.
Lunsford, A. (1979). “Cognitive development and the basic writer.” College English, 41.1. pp. 38–46.
Murray, D. (Fall 1972). “Teach writing as a process not product.” The leaflet. pp. 11–14.
Palincsar, A.S. (1998). “Social constructivist perspectives on teaching and learning.” Annual review of psychology, 49. pp. 345–75.
Perl, S. (1979). “The composing process of unskilled college writers.” Research in the teaching of English, 13.4. pp. 317–36.
Piaget, J. (1973). To understand is to invent: The future of education. New York: Grossman Publishers
Searle, J.R. (1995). The construction of social reality. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society. London: Harvard University Press.
Vygotsky, L. (1986). Thought and language. Trans. and ed. by A. Kozulin. Cambridge. MA: The MIT Press. (Originally published in Russian in 1934).
For the PDF file version of this blog posting