Lectures, courses, and conferences

Lectures:
Heath's lectures since 2000 have generally centered on one of three topics: early eighteenth-century children's literature (Cambridge University), informal learning in arts and sciences (Exploratorium, San Francisco; Kings College, London; Institute for Advanced Study, LaTrobe University, Melbourne, Australia), later language development (UC Berkeley, Center for Applied Linguistics), and academic literacy (UC Davis).

Abstracts of Lectures 2008-2009:
Ball Foundation, Chicago, Illinois. October, 2008
Adolescent literacy and language socialization: A few long-standing research findings sit at the core of what we know about academic literacy. These findings are: (1) speakers cannot write what they cannot say; (2) academic literacy depends on fluency in an identifiable set of syntactic structures; (3) competency in these structures results from extensive experience in certain roles and relationships. Despite these research findings, students and teachers struggle to build learners' ease and fluency in reading and writing the genres and styles of academic language. Yet schools have a difficult time providing contexts in which young people can play multiple roles and use literacies and numeracies in "real" ways that matter to them. Two community organizations (Artists for Humanity, Boston and The Food Project, Boston) sustained by young people demonstrate informal learning contexts that go a long way toward providing the language socialization necessary to support oral language habits critical to academic literacy for adolescents. Provided also will be a few efficient research strategies for documenting learners' language change over time.

Courses:

Heath has taught in a wide range of departments, and her courses tend to differ each year. Upon request, syllabi are available for courses such as The Anthropology of Play, Anthropology and Education, Later Language Development, Children's Literature, Informal Learning, and International Social Entrepreneurship. She is scheduled to teach Informal Learning in the fall term at Brown University. In the winter quarter 2008-2009 at Stanford University, she will teach Children's Literature in the English Department and The Anthropology of Education in the Graduate School of Education.

Included here is the syllabus for The Anthropology of Play, taught as an undergraduate course at Brown University in the fall of 2007.

The Anthropology of Play (Get Full PDF Version Of Syllabus Here)
Anthropology 1212, Fall term 2007
Shirley Brice Heath

Conferences: