Review_Author: Kim Piper
Book_Author: Shirley Brice Heath
Book_Title: Ways with Words
Date: 5/27/99
Time: 12:07:43 AM
Remote Name: 128.175.143.7
Shirley Brice Heath's "Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms," is a book that any person, lay or professional, working or studying, would enjoy. It is an ethnography of life in two communities in the Carolina Piedmont, and Brice Heath's style of writing makes you feel like you live there yourself.
Trackton and Roadville are small African-American and White communities, respectively, whose inhabitants lived for generations by working in the local mills. This book tells the story of their life cycle rituals, values, daily life, and uses of language. From the baby's first words to the living rooms of the grandmothers, Brice Heath gives us a glimpse into the worlds of two communities which may look the same in terms of socio- economic status, but which differ greatly in terms of every day life.
She begins by giving the reader a sense of the history of the people in this area of the United States. She lays the groundwork for the reader to understand where the people they read about came from; what their shared experiences were and why they view the world as they do. This is an extremely valuable effort on the author's part. I doubt a good understanding of these communities could be achieved without the historical information the author provides. She then proceeds to detail the lives of the current inhabitants of the communities.
The truly detailed descriptions of life in the communities begins with her chapters about babies' language acquisition. The adults of Trackton rarely if ever leave their babies alone; they are constantly held, played with, and otherwise toted around. Thus the babies are constantly exposed to people talking, both to them and to each other. Brice Heath titles this chapter, "Learning how to talk in Trackton." In contrast to this practice, the next chapter is called, "Teaching how to talk in Roadville." Inhabitants of Roadville begin to shape their babies lives' into a set routine from birth. They are very active in talking to their babies with the apparent goal of teaching them words for things in their environment. Whereas in Trackton adults simply talk to the babies and allow them to be in the presence of adult interactions, in Roadville adults actively attempt to draw their babies' attention to objects and their labels. I found this section of the book the most interesting, since it deals with the topic that I study.
The next chapters deal with oral traditions and views of literacy (from newspapers to bedtime stories). Brice Heath describes both communities' ways of telling stories, and the importance that each places on them. For both, stories serve as a uniting "tie that binds," but as with their approaches to infant language, they tell them in very different ways and value different qualities.
One of the most interesting topics that Brice Heath covers is that of education. Not only does she discuss each community's views and opinions regarding education, she also discusses the issue from the teacher's point of view. I found this discussion not only simply interesting, but of great relevance to this course. From issues of desegregation to classroom management, the author communicates the complex factors that contribute to every classroom, and the effects of children's upbringing on the decisions that must be made by the teacher. She gives the example of teachers having to change the style of directions they gave to their students in order to accomodate children who did not seem to pick up on subtle pragmatic cues, and needed to be told explicitly what was expected of them. She contrasts the communities' conceptions of time, and describes how these differences affect classroom management. Students from Trackton, who were brought up in a community that fed them when they were hungry, and let them sleep when they were tired, were not accustomed to a regimented schedule. This proved to be quite frustrating for teachers, and many found themselves changing their approaches to communicating with their students. She also discusses teachers' changing opinions about the practical applications of what they taught their students, and about their biases concerning their students' potential.
The book concludes with a description of a project in which a number of teachers engaged their students. The students became "junior ethnographers" themselves, gathering information by interviewing people in their communities. The author stresses the reciprocal nature of the results of the project: students became the sources of information in class discussions, and teachers learned from them. This entire description is a powerful contrast to the discussion of education given at the beginning of the book. In the early part of this century, the wealthy townspeople tried to mandate education for the mill workers in order to impose their own values on them. They considered the mill workers backward in many ways, and in need of reform and civilization. In only a few decades, education came to be used in conjunction with the communities from which the students came. Rather than trying to change them, teachers began to appreciate them.
"Ways with Words" is a wonderfully written, sensitive account of the lives of a couple of dozen families that makes the reader appreciate the intricacies and complexities of everyday life. I highly recommend this book to any person, regardless of his background, expertise, or lack thereof.