Shirley Brice Heath

Stanford University | SU · English Department & Linguistics Department

This Forum provides a range of voices on the Language Gap, as our aim is to shed light on the need for more critical dialogue to accompany the proliferation of political initiatives, policymaking, educational programs, and media coverage. We highlight some relevant background on the Language Gap and describe some of the research used to support the...

Studies of informal learning have tended to take for granted the success of youth in acquiring expertise with digital media. However, the pace of change in technologies increasingly requires individuals to learn on their own or in “unofficial” communities of learners. Examined here is a case of such learning within remote Indigenous communities of...

While doubts surround relations between adolescents and books, Heath argues that today's adolescents seek out reading opportunities that develop and deepen their special interests. Wanting to know and do more than their parents, young people prize learning on their own time to advance skills, ways of knowing, and peer relationships. Doing so, they...

Based on ten years of fieldwork with a focus on macro-micro linkages from organizational ethos and structure to language behavior and roleplaying, this report centers on institutional changes that affect cognitive, social, and linguistic development of youth. Argued here is the resilience of those young people who find their way to youth-based (as...

Heath takes readers back to Hymes's years as Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. She recalls, in particular, his relentless passion for introducing public school administrators to ethnography's potential for seeing what could be done to increase equity and social justice within public education. She contrasts this “...

IntroductionThe Unity of Art and Science: A Historical PerspectiveNeuroscience's Contributions to Language Socialization ResearchSocialization to Art and Science within Remote Indigenous CommunitiesAdolescent LanguagePlanned Learning Environments and the Separation of Art and ScienceConclusions References

Green, Judith and Cynthia Wallat, eds. Ethnography and Language in Educational Settings. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1981. xviii + 356 pp. $32.50 cloth; $16.50 paper.

Recent developments in physics and neurobiology help explain recursive interactions between peripheral images and higher cortical centres that process symbolic representation. Seeing with focused attention to colour, line, depth and form, for example, gains meaning and understanding through this recursive process. Art as representation of constant,...

F or more than 30 years, I have followed the 300 families of Roadville, a working-class white community, and Trackton, a working-class black community, both in the southeastern United States. As a linguistic an-thropologist, I began studying these families in 1969. I reported in Ways With Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classroom...

A conversation recorded at UC Berkeley, 29 September 2003

This chapter explores how three basic cognitive capacities-categorization, cross-domain mapping, and the use of conceptual models-operate at the specific level of understanding music. This exploration reveals the intimate dance that takes place between music, mind, and brain. How is it that human beings can make sense of music-a complex, multidimen...

Inner-city, at-risk adolescents prefer organizations that provide a range of program choices, offer youth-driven activities, and permit high levels of activity and enjoyment.

It should go without saying that just as human systems require ‘strategic thinking,’ so too do they depend upon ‘strategic talking.’ The collection of facts, persuasion of the unconvinced, and presentation of argument, case, or illustrative narrative must move ultimately into oral language (and often written language as well). Moreover, though most...

This article asks what happens to the learning of young children when they work regularly with a professional visual artist in their school. Through Creative Partnerships, a national programme initiated in 2002 to bring creative professionals into schools across England, some school children have had the opportunity for sustained project work with...

From the editors' introduction: “Although single-discipline investigations are arguably still the norm in most education research, government funding agencies worldwide have stepped up the call over the last several years for collaborations that span more than one field of inquiry. A major assumption behind this call is that multidisciplinary resea...

Colleges and universities, as well as employers, attend to the “extras”—the extracurricular that take place outside and beyond grades and jobs. Final admission judgments and job interview questions often center on the sports, artistic, or service dimensions that individuals include in their applications or resumes. Parents, politicians, and educato...

As George Marcus notes in Ethnography through Thick and Thin, the academic disciplines are built on particular "habits of thought and work."1 While Marcus was referring specifically to anthropology, the same can be said of other disciplines: each has its own epistemology, conventions, and sets of questions. Among the many disciplines influencing th...

Following a reviews of adult models of leadership and of leadership programs for young people that are derived from adult theories of leadership, we report results from a decade-long study in under-served and at-risk communities of young people identified and promoted as leaders within out-of-school youth organizations. This work reveals how emergi...

No group under the scrutiny of social scientists has been more heavily overgeneralized than urban teens who live in impoverished neighborhoods. From developmentalists to clinicians to educators, justice officials, and the popular media, adults have made universal and predominantly negative claims about the behaviors and attitudes of those in the se...

A brief historical perspective on social scientists’ treatment of culture precedes discussion of certain research methods generally taken to be a cultural. Sociolinguistic and anthropological studies have shown that mainstream practices (e.g., interviewing) and dominant concepts (e.g., individual as independent agent) receive little attention as cu...

Orality has been a feature repeatedly offered to typify African American language habits. Through anthropological studies of contemporary communities as well as literary portrayals and celebrations of cultural heroes such as preachers and political orators, the strong oral traditions of African Americans have figured prominently in discussions of t...

This article considers ways that schools and community-based youth organizations (CBOs) could build upon each other's strengths, respond explicitly to the realities of today's youth, and incorporate the attributes of the learning environments youth find most effective. Our analysis is based primarily on 5 years of field research in more than 60 suc...

Both language learning theorists and practitioners of teaching English as a second language or dialect have argued that role playing moves language learners beyond their usual performance in ordinary classroom presentations. This paper tells the story of how inner city youth organizations use dramas that young people write, cast, and direct to enab...

In this Monograph, we examine how toddlers and their caregivers from four cultural communities collaborate in shared activities. We focus both on similarities across communities in processes of guided participation-structuring children's participation and bridging between their understanding and that of their caregivers-and on differences in how gu...

Verbal skills traditional in many Black communities were acquired by a pattern of socialization that emphasized children's participation in community interaction, their adaptability to changing circumstances, and their individual interpretive talents. These skills, including the oral negotiation of written materials in family and social contexts, w...

Current strategies for school renewal are based on outdated concepts emphasizing family involvement in schools. The function of the family has been fundamentally altered culturally, demographically, and economically. New strategies necessitate changing school governance structures and crossing the boundaries of private and public sectors. (MD)

Authors Heath and McLaughlin respond to the previous critique by Dorothy Rich pointing out that any disagreement between Rich and themselves has more to do with interpretation than intent. (MD)

Reprinted 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 (twice), 1990, 1991, 1992 Incluye bibliografía e índice

One approach to studying the nature of diverse speech exchange systems across sociocultural groups starts from the premise that all learning is cultural learning, and that language socialization is the way individuals become members of both their primary speech community and their secondary speech communities. Researchers must recognize that the un...

Society is not in a crisis of literacy, but in a crisis of literate skills. Being literate in today's formal education system means being able to talk and write about language, to explain and sequence implicit knowledge and rules of planning, and to speak and write for multiple functions in appropriate forms. Literate understanding requires far mor...

Di PietroRobert J. (ed.), Linguistics and the professions. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Press, 1982. Pp. xv + 272. - Volume 12 Issue 4 - Shirley Brice Heath

Cambridge Core - Sociolinguistics - Ways with Words - by Shirley Brice Heath

Discusses the interrelationship of the language arts, and how both oral and written language help the learning process. Describes a classroom in which students' activities center around talking, and how the teacher participated as a researcher in ethnographic studies out of which came the motivation for this instructional approach. (HTH)

Abstract “Ways of taking” from books are a part of culture and as such are more varied than current dichotomies between oral and literate traditions and relational and analytic cognitive styles would suggest. Patterns of language use related to books are studied in three literate communities in the Southeastern United States, focusing on such “lite...

SavardJean-Guy and VigneaultRichard (eds), Les états multilingues: problèmes et solutions/Multilingual political systems: problems and solutions. Quebec: Les Presses de l'Université Laval, 1975. Pp. viii + 591. - Volume 6 Issue 3 - Shirley Brice Heath

[addresses] the question of the extent to which the meanings of cultural membership, played out in numerous texts by Trackton [a community of southern black working-class families described initially during the turbulent years of the 1960s and 1970s] adults for and with their children . . . , were retained and understood by the young sufficiently t...

Thesis--Columbia University. Vita. Bibliography: leaves 324-351. Microfilm.

En: REC : revista de estudios del curriculum Barcelona 1998, vol. 1, n. 3, junio ; p. 82-111 La investigación sobre la que se basa este artículo fue desarrollada a lo largo de cinco años en barriadas urbanas de tres grandes zonas metropolitanas estadounidenses, y se centró en la vida cotidiana de aquellas organizaciones juzgadas como efectivas por...

This lecture was given in Bloomington for the Indiana University Institute and Society for Advanced Study on September 20, 1991.