Ways with Words: Heath's Limitations

I found the second half of Heath's book to be more satisfying in how it discussed applying these ethnographic techniques to the classroom in both teacher and student activity. It seemed to me that it was in those last two chapters where the actual "project" of this work was situated; in other words, how do we go from observation of language patterns to productive use of that knowledge?

I want to focus most of my attention on the article "The Madness(es) of Reading and Writing Ethnography," which we also read for today. What I responded to here most was that, rather than stridently defending her own work, Heath acknowledges her own opacity to the "stylistic features" and "literary tropes" that are present in her work (258). She later addresses the ways in which her identity intruded on her research in ways that she did not thoroughly acknowledges in the text. She calls her competing goals at the time of the writing (e.g. as a mother, a teacher, a researcher, a community member) her "schizophrenic existence" (259). I think Heath is right to point out the fact that these conflicts exist and should be examined, but that this is merely one account by one researcher. So although last time in class we marveled at how extensive the study is and how difficult to reproduce, it's still, by its very nature, only a fraction of what was actually occurring at that time, in those communities.

To that end, the other interesting argument of the article is the way in which she reminds the reader that we are reading this with the benefit of theoretical knowledge that she did not have when writing it. She says "we impose our ideals of equity and access on the past" (262). It is not that she did not consider issues of gender, but her methods were a product of their time. It reminds us that we all write within the boundaries of our moment, that social and historical context that we cannot escape, no matter how enlightened, thorough, or scholarly we may be.