Each week, questions come to me about aspects of my research, and many of these cluster around certain themes. In the following questions and answers, I've grouped together questions that relate to these themes as well as to specific collections of my writings to which students, teachers, artists, and nonprofit leaders often refer.
1) Your fieldwork for Ways with Words lasted more than a decade, and we hear that you are now completing a 35-year follow-up of the 300 families of Roadville and Trackton. You began your work on exemplary youth organizations (with Milbrey McLaughlin) in 1987, and you continue studying a selection of these today. How do you explain these long-running studies, and what should young scholars today take from these, since it is unlikely that anyone will do such long-term studies again? ANSWER
2) The second half of Ways with Words, "Ethnographer Doing," provides what is often seen as the first U.S. example of teachers and students working as ethnographers. Since this work was published, the "teacher research" movement has grown immeasurably, as has widespread use of the label "ethnographic" to describe much of this work. Yet you have been critical of the use of "ethnographic" to cover the "research" of students and teachers. How do you explain these contradictions, and why do you seem to cling to a strong discipline-based view of "ethnography?" ANSWER
3). Since publication in the late 1990s of youth learning in the arts in community organizations, controversies have multiplied about the "transfer" values of the arts. You have remained out of the "arts education" debates, since you confine your research to "exemplary community organizations" that work with young people in leadership roles over extended periods of time. But what is your view? Do you think people should claim that work in the arts enhances mathematical skills or reading abilities? And, if not, why do you seem so often, especially in your public and conference lectures, to undercut the "transfer" arguments? ANSWER
4). You were one of the first scholars to point out the multiple modes of literacy and to urge attention to drawing and interpreting pictures, measuring and representing mathematics, and mixing modes with written language. You also have shown in much of your work the importance of sustained collaborative engagement by young children with ongoing projects of creative work. Yet these aspects of Ways with Words and "protean shapes" (1982) are largely ignored today in the "rediscovery" of multimodal literacies. What are your ideas about this? ANSWER
(1)Studying language development has much in common with the work of wildlife photographers who have to wait and wait for a particular animal to appear in a specific habitat. Language structures and uses do not roll out of the mouths of children and adolescents just when the ethnographer is around to record. Thus long-term fieldwork is one way of capturing subtle changes over time, along with the specific co-occurring circumstances of speakers' uses of specific structures. To gain the trust of families and their young children, as well as adolescents in peer networks, takes time, but even more important than the length of chunks of time spent is the predictability of continuing connections. Reentry into their circle provides a natural occasion for narratives, explanations, and activity accounts from members of the field site communities.
In other words, I have many "academic" reasons for continuing interest in the same cluster of phenomena with the same groups. Beyond these reasons, however, is a feature of my own personality. I often attribute my long-term fieldwork to the fact that I learn slowly and am extremely cautious about offering my generalizations regarding the values and behaviors of others. These habits are especially called for when the groups living and working in the fieldsites of my work live in under-resourced communities, often existing at the margins of the economy. Frequently stereotyped, often misrepresented in public media, and frequently subject to exclusion because of racial membership, immigration status, language background, or extent of academic achievement, the individuals included in my work merit special care in their representations in research. Just as research must not feed public misperceptions, so it cannot be advocacy or empty generalization.
(2)"Ethnography" came about as a term to describe the genre that social and cultural anthropologists wrote after their long-term fieldwork in a specific field site. Methods applied for this work ranged from fieldnotes, recordings, interviews, artifact and document collection, historical archival work, quantitative analyses of factors affecting everyday life (e.g., climate change, nutritional value of local foodstuffs, migration patterns, etc.). When "qualitative" as a broad descriptive term for types of research emerged in the 1990s to be equated with "ethnographic" and to exclude quantitative analyses, historical grounding, and knowledge of theories developed in prior research, many anthropologists stepped forward to clarify the range of research methods that led to the creation of ethnographies. Because much of my early work (during the late 1970s) had been in the law and legal history and medical discourse, I came to value highly "case studies"-fundamental to both law and medicine. Primarily descriptive, these studies enable experts to apply their professional expertise in law or medicine and to use comparative analysis to draw conclusions. Long-respected, critically needed, and highly specific in purpose, and based almost entirely on "qualitative" methods, case studies have immeasurable value for education. They offer platforms for those who use them to apply their experience, often clinical and practice-based, to the descriptive data.
Anthropologists (especially linguistic anthropologists) must bring given or a prior theories to the data they collect and then either test and expand these theories or derive new ones. This work has many contributions to make, but, in the main, the value of such research does not have the broad range of usefulness that case studies have.
I have therefore urged scholars to proceed with caution in overusing"ethnographic" and undervaluing what is to be gained from case studies. The intellectual history of any discipline should matter to those scholars who take up the mantle of a method or theory central to that discipline. Researchers from clinical fields or areas of study, such as law, medicine, dentistry, or education who take up methods or theories from anthropology, neuroscience, or psychology have an obligation to know something of the history into which they step. [See Heath, 1999 on "Discipline and Disciplines in Education Research: Elusive goals?" on this point, and see also Heath & Street, 2008.]
(3)Proving causal influence of a single factor for one or another aspect of human behavior is nearly impossible. To do so belittles the complexity of human mental capacities. Moreover, such claims generally amount to advocacy. From the beginning of my statements about what happens in arts-based learning environments in youth organizations, I have a) focused on the essential need to delineate features of "effective" learning environments and to define what "effective" means; b) pointed out that three core features (see below) must consistently be in place for young people to report or to evidence long-term effects in their personal lives of work in the arts; c) urged evaluators, funders, and scholars to recognize that most youth-based community organizations have goals that differ radically from the aims of classrooms, drop-in centers, or short-term lesson offerings by museums, city parks programs, or community groups.
The core features that co-occur with long-term reports of effects of work in the arts characterize only certain community organizations. Only rarely can schools or other formal education institutions offer these features. First, professional artists and critics must be available on a regular basis to the young people. Second, such an association will mean that the work of the young artists carries high risk in that it will be critiqued in front of others, rigorously selected for exhibition or performance, and often paid for by theatergoers, private collectors, or city officials. Finally, the work of the young artists must go on in the context of contributing to a collaborative effort to maintain the environment of their learning. For more on these points, see Heath & Smyth, 1999, and the documentaries on the DVD ArtShow 2 Grow.
(4)All scholars of literacy have to welcome the "rediscovery," for current resources in cognitive science, neurosciences, and vision studies will enable us to understand just how visual learning relates to working memory and verbal competency. Though social scientists must be cautious about their use of brain or vision research, we know also that our in-depth fieldwork can offer hypotheses for neuroscientists to consider as informing their work. Moreover, the cross-cultural, cross-linguistic work of social scientists offers instances and cases that may provoke different or added directions of neuroscientists. My own research from the 1980s and continuing studies of language development have enabled me to enter into conversations with neuroscientists and art historians, as well as evolutionary biologists, in order to explore the limits and the connection points of our fields. [See Mark Turner, ed. The Artful Mind: Cognitive science and the riddle of human creativity. 2006. Oxford University Press.]
