Shirley Brice Heath - Official Site

If you have come to this site, you are, no doubt, searching for information on language development, multiple types of literacy, or the possible cognitive and linguistic benefits for adolescents of long-term engagement in art or science projects. Or you may be interested in community organizations and informal learning environments, such as studios, rehearsals, and laboratories, in which arts and sciences work together when young people take part in sustained projects.

Follow any of these interests here, and let me know if you have further questions.

Policymakers, research funders, and cognitive neuroscientists are now turning their attention to how informal learning environments work.

Heath's chapter "Seeing our way into learning science in informal environments" leads readers into the language habits of adolescents engrossed in a science project of their own making.

Published in the long-awaited volume, Research on schools, neighborhoods, and communities, edited by William Tate, former President of the AERA, this chapter and others address numerous issues surrounding the seamlessness of learning across the boundaries of communities and schools.

Readers can check out the book on the AERA website or the website of Rowman & Littlefield.

Just out!

Think about how your family has changed over the past two generations.

Then read Words at work and play: Three decades in families and communities (2012).

Now available in the United States is the book that tells the long-awaited story of what has happened to the families that readers met back in 1983 in Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms (1983/1996).

This new book gives a close-up picture of how families from Roadville and Trackton spent their time through the 1980s, 1990s, and through the first decade of the 21st century. Through multi-site ethnographic methods, Heath tracked the patterns of talking, managing new technologies, and altering ways of using time and space of families as they faced the roller-coaster economic changes that followed the double-dip recession of the 1980s.

For readers who want a copy of both books, Cambridge University Press will offer the two at a bargain price at AAAL in Boston in March and AERA in Vancouver.