On 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,The Braid of Literature: Children's worlds of reading. 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).

Increasingly, the fine-grained observational work of studying learning-in-process can be informed by recent studies in the neurosciences. Note, for example, the first two references noted below.