Below are background and contextual details regarding the Black pupils in the Piedmont region of North and South Carolina, who are described in stories 10.03 and 10.09 as well as discussed in Chapter 3. These details come from Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms, which records in detail the observations of linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath during her extensive 1970s fieldwork in that region.
I selected the following background information and excerpts from Ways with Words to provide you with an understanding of how American-born first graders could come to school bearing a very largely holistic (relational) mindset.
Background: The children are from a small, working-class Black community called Trackton.1 Trackton was a cluster of eight two-family wooden houses on a dead-end dirt alley. Adults recalled the nearby community in which they grew up: Their families lived in wooden shells with no indoor plumbing; water was drawn from spigots along the dirt road; toilets were trenches at the back in the yard. No adult had more than a few years of schooling; all adults believed schooling could lead to better lives for their children.
During their first year, infants sleep with family members and are held, carried, and cuddled by all residents of the community. When babies cry, they are fed, tended, held, and fondled by anyone nearby. Babies are restrained from exploring.
Trackton babies are listeners and observers in a stream of communication that flows about them. They literally feel the bodily shifts in emotion of those who hold them. When infants begin to utter sounds that can be interpreted as referring to items or events, they receive no special attention.
Children have no occasion to sit alone and play with toys. Sometimes an adult will bring toddlers plastic soldiers, trucks, miniature bats and balls, or doll babies. Toys that have multiple pieces such as puzzles are not given. Books, manipulative toys, and blocks do not exist unless brought by an outsider. Adults do not explain verbally how to do things. They say only “Do it like dis” as they repeat the action.
No one lifts labels and features out of their contexts for explication. Thus, children’s entry into a classroom that depends on lifting items and events out of context is a shock. Their abilities to contextualize and to create highly imaginative stories are suppressed in the classroom. The school’s approach establishes decontextualized skills as foundational in the hierarchy of academic skills.2
Endnotes:
1 Trackton is a pseudonym devised by Dr. Heath.
2 Heath, 29, 48–49, 74–75, 77, 353, edited and shortened.