Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor
Dr. Shirley Brice Heath
Tuesday, February 7 - Saturday February 11
 Biography
Dr. Shirley Brice Heath, the 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 (http://www.shirleybriceheath.com/).
College of Education talk
Sustaining Learning and Language: Forgotten in Education? - This event is open to the public
February 8, 2006: 4:30-6:00
Americans like beginnings. Middles and ends seem to fade out of attention or attract only negative attention (e.g., "scores fall again" or "graduation rate drops"). Lamenting this pattern is easy; altering the focus in education on "early," "acquisition," or "learning to…" is much more difficult. This talk will examine later language development (during middle childhood and adolescence and oriented toward "learning for…") and will detail the critical importance of specific types of language structures and discourse forms for academic achievement and life-wide learning. Of particular attention will be the sustaining power for language and learning that is peculiar to certain types of project-based undertakings. Data will be drawn from both community organizations and school-change programs.
Recommended Readings:
Public Lecture and Film Screening, Art Museum - These events are open to the public
ARTSHOW, a film by Shirley Brice Heath
February 9, 2006, 4:30-5:10
ARTSHOW, a prize-winning documentary that describes 4 youth-based arts organizations in the United States will be shown. The 56 minute film tells the stories of these organizations engaging young people through the arts in social entrepreneurship and community-building within two rural and two urban communities of the United States. The documentary, released in 2000, premiered at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC; and London and Stockholm. The film will be shown before the lecture.
Art and Science: Companions in learning for society, a lecture by Dr. Shirley Brice Heath
February 9, 2006, 5:30-6:30
Dr. Heath will discuss critical programs being enacted in sites around the world that center on altering life and advancing learning in rural areas. These programs include creative writing programs, environmental projects and outreach from museums and other typically perceived urban centers.
Reception following film and lecture.
Recommended Reading
Doctoral Student Workshops - The workshops are not open to the public
Workshop #1
Ethnography: What the nuts and bolts are meant to be
February 10, 2006: 9:00-11:00 a.m.
An overview will set up activities for a heads-into-it workshop on a range of neglected methods of data collection and analysis techniques historically included within anthropologists' research that leads to the writing of ethnographies. Participants may wish to bring two pages of carefully prepared language transcriptions and a one-page description contextualizing the stretch of discourse, conditions for collecting the data, and primary research question.
Required Readings:
Workshop #2
Visual and Linguistic Learning Hand-in-Hand
February 10, 2006: 1:00-3:00 p.m.
Recent research from anthropology, cultural psychology, and neuroscience points to the futility of equating learning primarily with verbal display. This workshop will enlist participants in studying videotapes and children's art work to grasp how visual focus on line, form, color, and movement works as collaborative partner for particular kinds of verbal learning. The hand in creative manipulation, along with verbal explication and visual focus, can accentuate memory of detail and conceptual grasp of integrative properties of process and product. The workshop will address the special challenges that studying manual and visual learning presents to scholars.
Required Readings:
Dr. Heath's work at the University of Iowa is made possible by the Ida Cordelia Beam Visiting Distinguished Professor program, the Language, Literacy and Culture program, the College of Education Department of Teaching and Learning, Foreign Language and ESL Education, Art Education, the Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry, the Department of Rhetoric, the Department of Communications Studies, the Foreign Language Acquisition and Research in Education program, the Department of Anthropology, the University of Iowa Museum of Art, and the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. For more information, contact Dr. Gail Boldt at gail-boldt@uiowa.edu.
Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to attend all University of Iowa sponsored events. If you are a person with a disability who requires accommodation in order to participate in this program, please contact Gail Boldt at (319)335-5565 or at gail-boldt@uiowa.edu. |
