Shirley Heath

Shirley Brice Heath is an American linguistic anthropologist, and Professor Emerita, Margery Bailey Professorship in English, at Stanford University.

She graduated from Lynchburg College, Ball State University, and Columbia University, with a Ph.D. in 1970. She is a Brown University professor-at-large, and a visiting research professor at the Watson Institute.

Shirley Brice Heath is best known as an anthropologist for her ethnographical work in * Ways with Words: Language, Life, And Work In Communities And Classrooms, Cambridge University Press, 1983, ISBN . She spent nine years,1969-1978, performing a cross cultural, ethnographical comparison of language practices between two small communities,Trackton and Roadville. Located only 6 miles apart in the central area of the Piedmont region in the Carolinas, both working class textile mill communities had similar demographics in terms of size and average salaries. However, Trackton is predominantly African American and Roadville is a white community. Heath lived and worked among both communities with a goal of identifying the effects of home life and community environment on the style of language used among dwellers, with a final objective to identify how these styles transfers into school settings and beyond. Heath not only immersed herself within both Trackton and Roadville's cultures, she helped identify and improve the curriculum as well as teaching styles needed in order for community members to receive a valuable education. Heath admits herself that Ways' “is not a model for refining new education curriculum but a model for ethnographical research in the field of education [1].

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