Shirley Brice Heath’s “Ways with Words” is a lovely,
readable book. Its anthropological perspective gently brings the reader into the lives
of its subjects and their rich community lives. In Chapter 8, Heath takes
everything she has observed about the children’s different language communities
into the crucible of the school. She writes about a dramatic moment in time: desegregation was pushing
the races and classes together and teachers knew they have to learn to
negotiate the differences.
What struck
me most in this chapter was that even 40 years ago at least some scholars and
teachers understood that respecting the student’s native dialect (language) is
essential to preserving his or her identity and to creating a foundation for
higher linguistic skills. Heath describes a play that teachers wrote in 1974 in
which a black adolescent girl pleads, “Show me…that by adding a fluency in
standard dialect, you are adding something to my language and not taking
something away from me. Help me retain my identity and self-respect while learning
to talk ‘your’ way.” (271) Even earlier, William Labov had published “The Logic
of Nonstandard English” (1969) and Joey Dillard had written Black English: Its history and usage in the
United States. Yet it seems these ideas still haven’t completely taken
hold.
I was
fascinated with what Heath and the classroom teachers learned about the
different groups’ nonverbal differences (ideas of time, play, order) and verbal
differences (naming practices, politeness formulae, habits of questioning) as
they came together in the classroom. The students’ varying notions of story was
equally fascinating. I cheered as I read that the teachers learned they needed
to state rules and codes directly and explicitly. As someone whose early years
were spent moving from one community to another, I know how difficult it is to
“read” and understand behavior that is new and how lost one can feel without any direct guidance.
Heath’s
description of the creative ways in which the teachers worked to rise to the
challenge was interesting and heart-warming. The pressure of desegregation gave urgency to their attempts to make changes in their classrooms. While some
contemporary communities may be experiencing similar pressures from an influx
of new immigrants, other communities may be too homogeneous to feel any need to step back and examine behavior with an ethnographer’s lens.
One of the reasons I loved being an education reporter some years back was because schools are where our society so often places its hopes and dreams--for our children and for our communities. The schools in Shirley Brice Heath's community bore all of that weight as well.
