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- discourse patterns prevalent in a variety of learning events at home
and their use to structure learning experiences in the classroom
(Jordan,1985).
As settings and Issues vary so widely, the work of 'translating culture'
for classroom use cannot follow ready-made prescriptions. If an
ethnographic approach is taken seriously, it necessarily entails a teacher
with the attitudes and skills necessary to use the tools of ethnographic
research to find out children's 'ways of knowing' in their out-of-school
experience that can be incorporated in the classroom learning activities.
In the work of Heath, for example, teachers are 'learning researchers, who
used knowledge from ethnographies of communication to build a two-way
channel between communities and their classrooms' (Heath,1983:354): when
they asked themselves the question 'what makes reading easy?1, their
response was not to further Investigate the psychological processes of
reading, or new teaching methods, or new forms of classroom organization
and discourse - but to go and ^tudy the literacy events In the houses of
the children, what reading means for one brought up in that community,
and to devise specific, ingenious methods for classroom literacy
activities that would build on existing practice. Teachers' purpose 'was
not to bring children's folk culture back into the classroom for study'
(Heath,1983:340); but rather, to find out how culture shapes the process
of acquiring, integrating and controlling knowledge: the ways of learning
in the community shape the ways of doing in the classroom. This is more
than simply suggesting the use of ethnographic techniques (such as
pariclpant observation) in teacher education for the study of classroom
interaction (Voods,1985), or having teachers adopt the results of
naturalistic studies of home interaction as models for classroom
discourse.