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Shirley Brice Heath














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Shirley Brice Heath, Margery Bailey Professor of English and Dramatic Literature at Stanford, is a linguistic anthropologist whose primary interests are oral and written language, youth development, race relations, and organizational learning. She is the author of the prize-winning book Ways with Words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms (1983) and co-editor of Identity and Inner-city Youth: Beyond ethnicity and gender (1993), as well as several other books and over 100 articles and book chapters. She is widely known for her work with young people as co-researchers in the townships of Johannesburg, South Africa, as well as economically disadvantaged communities of the United States. Her primary research since 1987 has been with young people in under-resourced neighborhoods who learn entrepreneurial and community-building skills as they help create and sustain positive learning environments that contribute local cultural and economic resources. Her special interest in this work is documenting organizational structures and communication practices that surround everyday learning and progression in complex task achievement. She teaches courses in English, Linguistics, and Anthropology; she also team-teaches a course in social entrepreneurship with Professor Greg Dees of Stanford's Graduate School of Business.

She has directed a documentary video, ArtShow, that describes four youth-based arts organizations in the United States. The documentary, released in the late fall of 1999, has had highly successful screenings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC; and London and Stockholm. Screenings are scheduled for Chicago and New York. The documentary details for four youth-based arts organizations (in New York, Boston and rural communities of Kentucky and northern California) the ways in which young people defy the public perception of youth as vulnerable, apathetic, and disengaged from productive challenge. Through their work in the arts in these organizations, young people develop projects that immerse younger children in learning. In addition, several groups work to earn money through their artwork to help support their organization. The members of these organizations keep their artistic ventures and individual dreams alive while remaining connected to their hunger for meaningful productive risks of learning, teaching, and creating art.

A resource guide, ArtShow: Youth and Community Development (with Laura Smyth), summarizes the research project from which the documentary derived and centers on cognitive and linguistic learning as well as community development. Both the video and the resource guide are available from Partners for Livable Communities. A broader treatment of the research project written by Milbrey W. McLaughlin is Community Counts, available from www.PublicEducation.org. The research team who worked on the study directed by Heath and McLaughlin includes several young scholars whose publications detail aspects of the learning lives of young people in community organizations.

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