Teachers as Learners

If Shirley Brice Health’s mission was to understand how children’s language development is affected by the cultural communities they grow up in, she certainly has achieved her goal.  I mean she handles a potentially sensitive topic about how to increase the success of minority and working-class students in school by conducting an ethnographic study that records and interprets the language learning habits of two communities, one white and the other black. I think she deserves praise. 

Heath gives teachers and other educators an opportunity to become more intimately connected with how cultural differences affect language and literacy.  She demonstrates in her study “how the ethnographies of communication in Roadville and Trackton became instrumental for teachers and students bringing language and culture differences and discovering how to recognize and use language as power” (266). Basically Heath is suggesting that teachers bring their own biases into the classroom and that they often perpetuate the values and standards of institutional and corporate interests. 

I think it is really interesting how Heath places the onus on teachers to use her research findings as a basis for change their attitudes and expectations about the relevance of teaching reading and writing to Trackton and Roadville students who were not college-bound, but who instead were on a vocational track.  I think Health wants her readers to realize that language learning does not exist in a vacuum, that there are socio-cultural determinants for how people read and write. Her point is that teachers need to realize that students bring a history and a background to the classroom that needs to be respected, rather than shunned and denigrated. 

The folks in Trackton and Roadville instinctively know that if they want to one day leave Trackton and Roadville that literacy is a potential way to reach some semblance of economic and mainstream acceptance by the townspeople and the mill owners.  Yet, the sad reality is that Heath says neither children from Trackton nor Roadville are ready for school in the same way that the townspeople children.  She writes, “Thus it is the kind of talk, not the quantity of talk that sets townspeople children on their way in school.  They come with the skills of labelling, naming features, and providing narratives on items out of their contexts.” (352)  Reading Heath’s study, I am more convinced than ever that we as a society should be advocating for pre-school and universal pre-kindergarten.  If we want to really give poor, working-class, and disadvantaged children a leg-up, we need to fund these initiatives and respect their culture and backgrounds at the same time.

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