On Ethnography

This week's readings, Heath's Ways with Words, an ethnographic study on two communities made me think about several aspects.
In the fist place, Heath inevitably makes us wonder what education is and which agents are in charge of kid's education. As Heath narrates, "Trackton adults have had little schooling, but they believe it has made a difference for others, and it will make a difference for them. They tell their children: "go to school, learn to talk right, to read and write, and you can get on outta here". At home, children in both communitities learn language, hear their elders talk about "talkin" and "doin" right, and some have come to realize that languages, schooling and learning are critically linked to the ways one gets on at home, school and work" (1983: 29). Therefore, getting to now these homes and how things go there enables us to understand schooling at the same time. Heath's ethnographic study aims at better understanding the educational system of these two communities.
However, even though Heath is aware of the limitations of his study, we have to ask ourselves the following questions: would it be possible to carry out studies like this one at a larger scale? in what cases do we need to do it? what are the factors that determine that a particular schooling situation deserves to be ethnographically studied? And also, after having carried out the study, what are the factors that aregoing to be considered in order to implement modifications in a particular schooling situation?

My impressions while reading Heath's study were that I was reading something similar to a realistic novel and I would sometimes ask myself about the relevance of what I was reading. Some other times I would not understand what Heath wanted to express and I would have liked to see an example. Although Heath makes evaluative comments all the time, sometimes I wanted to know the why of certain things that I thought could be relevant. For instance, when Heath is interviewing two women and the laugh, Heath transcribes it but does not explain why they were laughing (1983: 64).
Therefore , an ethnographic study like this one may be interpreted in different ways by different people and thus, the outcomes of the study and the solutions proposed to implement the situation may differ a lot from each other. For example, what caught my attention was the fact that women seem to have a very different role than men. Heath says that "the link between mother and son lasts the longest and is the strongest" (68) and women write and read more than men do, so the role women have in educating the kids at home is much more relevant. Therefore, the way they have been educated is going to influence the way they will educate their kids. These are some of the aspects I focused my attention on, which because of my personality and my interests, may be different from the rest of the readers.
In my opinion, ethnography is very useful when we want to understand why something is happening in a particular situation but its role is to support or reject an already existing theory or hypothesis.