Torrington: Ethnography in Action

Though Heath's seminal comparative study provides literacy researchers with practical insights regarding the relationship between home and school literacies, what I find most useful and interesting about the first part of Heath's book is her methods and methodology, as it provides an example of ethnography in action. During her 9 year ethnographic study, Heath collaborated with teachers and graduate students as she collected and analyzed data from two communities in Carolinas: one town made primarily up of black rising working class families  (Trackton) and one that was mostly long time working-class white folks (Roadville). Because Heath was interested in the ways these populations communicated both in and out of school, Heath recorded communication  at school, at home, or at the textile mills. After cross-comparing the trends of communication in Trackton and Roadville  (for both the children themselves and the ways they were instructed), Heath asks the question: “For each of these groups, what were the effects of the preschool home and community environment on the learning of those language structures and uses which were needed in classrooms and job settings” (4)?

What strikes me most about Heath's study is that, as a self-declared anthropologist, she entered the community naturally, through acquaintances and acted as a participant-observer by getting to know and respecting the communities under study. In describing her study, Heath is clear in her agenda, and she defends her narrative methodology by contending that quantitative data approaches fail to account for the social-cultural contexts of literacy practices (8). She notes her responsibility to represent the varying dialects of her participants by working to capture their speech as it occur, as the participants “are the products of their history and current situation” (10). Finally, she acknowledges her own affect as the researcher on the study, noting that the stories she tells are incomplete (13), and that “From ethnographer learning, or coming to ‘know,’ I have become ethnographer doing" (13), and thus, affected the social realities of her sites.

Given this responsible and thorough study design, Heath's suggestion that “educators should not look here [in the book] for experiments, controlled conditions, and systematic score-keeping on the academic gains and losses of specific children. Nor should psycholinguisitics look here for data taped at periodic intervals under similar conditions over a predesignated period of time” (8-9) strikes a chord with me as a literacy researcher Yet I wonder about the conflict that researchers (like me and Heath) come up against when such narrative methods and ethnographic designs clash with policymakers that want hard numbers. How do we resist the pressure to produce numbers for numbers' sake?