Week 13: Ways With Words, Objectivity, and Embodiment

I had really mixed feelings this week reading the first half of Shirley Brice Heath’s Ways With Words. 

I know from what others have said that it is often called a “classic” in child development, ethnography, and literacy studies.  And, I was really impressed with the wide scope of the study of both “Trackton” and “Roadville” communities over such a long (10 year!) period. Her general argument, that home life and upbringing greatly effect how we come to see the world, participate in it, and perform later in life seem to me to be vital contributions to various fields.

I also couldn’t help but see some of my own background occasionally in the Roadville community. I belong to the second generation removed from the northern, Midwest equivalent of the mills—factories. Both my grandfathers were Midwest factory workers (machinists) who barely finished high school; one of my grandmother’s dropped out to have my mother at sixteen and never finished.  My mother only finished high school.  That is a long way of saying that from a personal standpoint, I’m often nodding in agreement with her.

However, from a more academic perspective, I struggled with this text on several levels.  

 First, I would have liked to see more evidence of the empirical data that she collects throughout her ethnography.  At various points, she stops and provides charts (ie topics of hand-clapping songs, uses of reading, uses of writing).  It is at these points that her qualitative analysis seems strongest, seems most viable to me. 

Perhaps this lack of quantitative data is acceptable because of the scope and breath of her study? Or, perhaps it is a convention of the linguistics/literacy discourse in which I am not a member? From the outside however, this feels so qualitative at times that I have a hard time seeing its relevance to anything larger.  It seems to be one outsider’s (no matter her background) perspective on the goings on of two communities.  Interesting, but not particularly objective, not particularly focused.

Secondly, while she tries to claim that she is unbiased/objective and goes so far as to say that she will not bring in anything into the environment which was not already commonly found in the communities to begin with (8), she does invariably introduce one major anomaly:  herself.  I don’t see how she can account for the influence that her embodied presence has on the environment that she is working to study, and, being around for almost ten years would surely have had an impact.  Let me give one short example to better illustrate my point. 

In chapter 3, Heath recounts the fact that Trackton adults typically never use baby talk when they speak to their infants (95).  However, Health and her children could not help but use such talk when they interacted with the Trackton babies:  “My children and I often slipped into baby talk with infants and young children in Trackton, and the adults made fun of us for doing so” (95).  This then exposes the babies in the community over the period of her study to the kind of baby talk that she argues Trackton children aren’t exposed to otherwise.  Further, while she notes that the adults in the community laugh at Heath and her children (more embodied presences!) for their antics, they are still noticing that the academic Health and her middle or upper-middle class children perform this baby talk.  Over time, this could influence the values of the community in terms of “best practice” with infants.

I look forward to finishing this text for next week. Perhaps the end will offer more of what I feel is missing/concerning in the first half.