Varenne: ITSF5016 - Patterns of Southern reading and telling styles

This is the seventh in a series of notes to fifteen lectures for my class ITSF5016 "Ethnography of Education"

Differentiation: from class to culture
1. class:
  1. Lareau and, before her, Basil Bernstein: class differences produce distinct local conditions for social interaction that have distinct consequences for communicational patterns (what Bernstein called "codes") with further consequences when children socialized into these patterns come to schools where communicational patterns have a different class base.
    1. a critique by Hill and Varenne (1981)
  2. all variations in "culture of poverty" arguments during the 1960s
2. culture:
  1. in a reaction to the altogether deterministic nature of the class arguments (even though this argument was supported by ethnographic description as well as large scale sociological and socio-psychological research), anthropologists, mostly, pointed out the extent to which communicational pattern differentiation mapped ethnic origin.
    1. The most obvious examples was produced by the reinterpretation of the difficulties experiences by immigrants to the United States (e.g. people from the hispanic Carribeans) as well as the internally quasi-colonized (e.g. American Indians, people of Mexican origin in the South West, etc.). From a focus on processes of transformative assimilation ("melting pot" theory) social analysis shifted to a focus on the maintainance of alternative ways -- a maintainance that some political groups argued should be fosterd.
      1. William Labov on Black English
      2. John Gumperz
      3. Susan Philips on silence in the Warm Spring researvation (1972)
    2. and the consequences for teacher/student relationships in the classroom (Cazden et al. 1972)
The call for careful descriptions of the social ordering of communicational media
1. Dell Hymes, "ethnographies of speaking," and the rethinking of what to study when studying human languages:
  1. there is an order to speaking that traditional linguistic never focused on
  2. discovering this order requires accumulating detailed descriptions of how people actually talk to each other (when, with whom, in what ways...)
2. ethnographies of reading
  1. by analogy to speaking and in reaction against mechanistic, or historically materialistic, theories of the relationship between literacy and social order.
    1. literacy can be used in a multitude of ways, some liberating, some enslaving.
    2. actually it is difficult to count what is to count as "literacy" given the fact that reading's reality as a mental skill says nothing about the use of this skill (by whom, when, to what effect, etc.)
      1. people who "know how to read" may not read what some might wish they read or for expected purposes;
      2. people who "do not know to read" may have access to others, including subalterns, who do know
    3. it is necessary to understand the social positioning of any particular form of literacy. Thus the need for ethnographies.
3. Shirley Brice Heath's as the most celebrated a long list of works (Brian Street)
  1. a classic comparison of three ways through a focus on "language habits"
    The place of language in the cultural life of each social group is interdependent witht the habits and values of behaving shared among members of that group. Therefore, any reader who tries to explain the community contrasts in this book on the basis of race will miss the central point of the focus on culture as learned behavior and on language habits as part of that shared learning. (p. 11)
  2. Patterns of Southern culture -- The basic implicature of Heath's formulation
    1. Roadville,
    2. Trackton
    3. "the town" and its schools
  3. Do note the extent of specific instruction (p. 50) and elaborate discussion of each way, including comparatively, in all settings
The return to schooling and curriculum policy
1. "multi-culturalism" and other forms of state control of cultural awareness
The, minority, critique
1. Varenne, McDermott and culture as disability
The note on metholodogy
1. again, generalization from case studies
  1. descriptive generalization
  2. generalization to policy recommendations
2. on anthropological representation of anthropological work

Some questions
StudyPlace conversation
on p.109, Heath mentions that Trackton people are aware of the peculiarities of their way of speaking to their young children. What is the implication of this awarenes for the interpretation of the overall case?