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Ethnography

Since the early 1980s, ethnography, the time-honored genre of cultural and social anthropologists, has morphed into a set of methods used by not only social scientists, but also clinicians in nursing, marketing, and creative leadership training. While recognizing the practical value of methods considered to be "ethnographic" in a host of fields, Heath has stayed very much with the idea that grounding in theories of linguistic anthropology and long-term comparative fieldwork provide a type of knowledge not available through short-term "ethnographic" methods. Many of her publications address methods of research toward ethnography and the special difficulties that fieldwork in linguistic anthropology faces with some populations (e.g., peer groups of adolescents). Some of her publications address the disadvantages to Education of the loss of training in the disciplines by those who undertake "education research."

Fundamental in much of Heath's work has been the involvement of those being studied in the nuts and bolts of collecting and analyzing language data. She has taken part in such work with young mothers documenting book-reading with their children (see Books Wolf & Heath, 1992; Papers Heath, Branscombe, & Thomas, 1986) and teachers in special education classes (Heath & Branscombe, 1986). She has also enlisted adolescents as members of a long-term study of learning environments beyond the school and family. They have kept diaries of their mindful attention to art during selected days, interviewed key learners in their lives, and analyzed their participation in specific group-centered activities [see the bibliography in ArtShow, Heath & Smyth, 1999).

Noted below is a selection of Heath's recent publications on ethnography. The first of these reflects Heath's commitment to bringing young people into authorship. This volume was co-authored with Brian Street, the eminent British anthropologist, and Molly Mills, a first-year student in Heath's Anthropology and Education course taught at Brown University in the Fall of 2006.

2008. (with Brian Street and Molly Mills). On Ethnography: Approaches to language and literacy research. New York: Teachers College Press.
1999. Discipline and disciplines in education research: Elusive goals? In Issues in Education Research: Problems and possibilities. E. C. Lagemann & L. S. Shulman, eds. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Pp. 203-233.
1997. Culture: Contested realm in research on children and youth. Applied developmental science 1.3:113-123. (PDF Available)
1995. (with Steve Athanases). Ethnography in the study of the teaching and learning of English. Research in the teaching of English. 20.3:263-287
1995. Ethnography in communities: Learning the everyday life of America's subordinated youth. In Handbook of research on multicultural education. J.A. Banks & C. Banks, eds. New York: Macmillan. Pp. 114-128. (PDF Available)
1993. The madness(es) of reading and writing ethnography. In Anthropology and education quarterly. 24.3: 256-268 (PDF Available)