Thoughts on "Ways with Words" (Chapter 8)

           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.