Learning and Language Development

Heath's research centers on learning and human development across cultures, institutional settings, and organizations. How language and cognition develop in the different socialization settings in which children, young people, and adults learn the structures, uses, and values of their language(s) is detailed in her longitudinal studies. The cultural values and behaviors, as well as the organizational structures, that surround the learning of language have been at the heart of all her research.

Best known for Ways with Words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms (1983/1996), she has continued to do the kind of long-term fieldwork that characterized this study. She spent a decade living in two working-class communities located only a few miles apart in the piedmont Carolinas. Trackton, a black community, and Roadville, a white community, were intimately linked to the textile mills of the region as well as to the strong agricultural base of the Piedmont. In both Trackton and Roadville, as well as among mainstream middle-class school-oriented black and white families, Heath documented how children learned to use language and how their uses of language established their identity, roles, and relationships among families and friends. Following these children into their schools in the early days of desegregation, she documented how their quite distinct ways of learning language affected their integration into academic life. Roadville and Trackton each differed from expectations the mainstream families and schools held about uses of language. Most critical to academic success were certain ritualized uses of language, such as assignment of labels to objects, response to questions whose answers were already known to the questioner, and recitation of discrete points of factual material separated from context. Mainstream families, black and white, adopted these practices, accepting these as "normal" and seeing their schoolwork and extracurricular activities as essential to their children's future success.

Heath has done several studies of the Roadville and Trackton children and of their entry into young adulthood and parenting roles. In 2001, a thirty-year follow-up of three hundred families from the two communities will be published, illustrating the radically different contexts in which the children of the children of Trackton and Roadville are raising their young. Language learning situations, as well as uses of language, types and ways of reading and writing, and perceptions of communication, have been dramatically altered over three decades of geographic and social mobility by the families.

This finding is particularly evident in the continuing work on human development that Heath began in 1987, when she joined with Milbrey W. McLaughlin (Public Policy, School of Education, Stanford University) to design a study of learning in the nonschool hours. Over a decade of study of youth-based community organizations has followed, revealing the patterns of interaction, uses of oral and written language, and perceptions of learning that young people develop in certain types of organizations. The key point here is that only those organizations with particular structures and ways of viewing youth create exemplary learning environments that will attract and keep young people who have often resisted school and classroom life. Such organizations must regard young people as their key assets, as fundamental resources, and they must engage individuals and the group in decision-making that matters to the life of the organization. By so doing, these organizations enable youth to practice adulthood in safe places, meaningful pursuits, and with lots of close-up models and mentors in their older peers within the organization. Numerous publications, both for nonacademic audiences and in scholarly journals, have reported findings from this research. The listing below includes only a few of the most recent of these.

Public reports:
2000.  McLaughlin, Milbrey W. Community Counts: How youth organizations matter for youth development. Washington, DC: Public Education Network. [The executive summary and report can be downloaded from www.PublicEducation.org.]

1999.  Heath, Shirley Brice and Smyth, Laura. ArtShow: Youth and Community Development. Washington, DC: Partners for Livable Communities. Pp. 96. [This resource guide summarizes the research project, but it gives special attention to the role of the arts in youth organizations. Featured are four youth-centered arts-focused groups whose organizations provide the central narrative of the documentary video ArtShow. See ArtShow: Youth and Community Development on this website for an executive summary of the resource guide and a synopsis of the documentary.]

1999.  Heath, Shirley Brice (with Adelma Roach). Imaginative Actuality: Learning in the arts during the nonschool hours. In Champions of Change: The impact of the arts on learning. Washington, DC: Arts Education Partnership and President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Pp. 20-34.

Academic publications:
Heath's publications on the study of youth organizations have centered on language and cognitive development. The following two articles summarize the gist of that work.

1999.  Dimensions of Language Development. In Cultural Processes of Child Development: The Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology. Vol. 29. A. S. Masten, ed. Mahweh, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. Pp. 59-76.

1998.  Working through Language. In Kids Talk: Strategic language use in later childhood. S. Hoyle and C. T. Adger (eds.). New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 217-240.

Jennifer Lynn Wolf, a researcher with Heath, has published several resources on learning and language development. Click here to view these.