Stanton Wortham is the Judith and Howard Berkowitz Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. From 2000-2004 he served as Chair of the Educational Leadership Division at Penn GSE, in 2002 he served as Acting Dean, in 2006-2007 as Interim Dean, and from 2004-2006 and 2007 to the present he has served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. He also has appointments in Anthropology, Communications and Folklore at Penn. He earned his B.A., with highest honors, from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, in Human Development. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and has been a National Graduate (Javits) Fellow, a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow, and a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow. He has received the Maine Campus Compact Faculty Service-Learning Award and the American Educational Research Association Cattell Early Career Research Award. He serves on eight editorial boards and has reviewed submissions for thirty-three journals and several publishers, across the disciplines of anthropology, education, linguistics, psychology and sociology. Dr. Wortham has written widely on classroom discourse and the linguistic anthropology of education, applying techniques from linguistic anthropology to uncover social positioning in apparently neutral talk. His books Acting out participant examples in the classroom (John Benjamins, 1994), Linguistic anthropology of education (Praeger, 2003, coedited with Betsy Rymes) and Learning identity: The joint emergence of social identification and academic learning (Cambridge University Press, 2006), together with various articles and chapters, explore interrelations between the official curriculum and covert interactional patterns in classroom discourse. This work describes how social identification and academic learning can deeply depend on each other, both through a theoretical account of the two processes and detailed empirical analyses of how students' identities emerge and how students learn curriculum. Learning identity uses ethnographic and discourse analytic methods to trace the identity development of two students over a year in one classroom, showing how they came habitually to occupy characteristic roles across the year. The book also traces two major themes from the curriculum, showing how students came to make increasingly sophisticated arguments about them. The book's distinctive contribution is to show in detail how social identification and academic learning became deeply interdependent. The two students developed unexpected identities in substantial part because curricular themes provided categories that teachers and students used to identify them. And students learned about those curricular themes in part because the two students were socially identified in ways that illuminated those themes. Dr. Wortham has also studied interactional positioning in media discourse and autobiographical narrative, and he has developed methodological techniques for analyzing narrative, media and other everyday discourse. His book Narratives in Action (Teachers College Press, 2001) explores how storytelling - whether done in therapy, or with a friend - can partly construct the narrator's self. The book provides a systematic conceptual account of how narrative self-construction can work, focusing on the social, cultural, and relational contexts of storytelling. It also provides a concrete methodological approach to analyzing narrative discourse, offering step-by-step guidance on how to uncover and document meaningful patterns in transcribed talk. More recently, Dr. Wortham has begun research with Mexican immigrant and Mexican American adolescents who live in areas of the United States that have only recently been home to large numbers of Latinos. Some of this work is collected in Education in the New Latino Diaspora (Ablex, 2002; coedited with Enrique Murillo and Edmund Hamann), together with associated articles and conference presentations. The work explores the challenges and opportunities facing both Latino newcomers and host communities, in places where models of newcomers' identities and practices for dealing with newcomers are often more fluid than in areas with longstanding Latino populations.
Educational Foundations
Self/Knowledge - Chapter One, GSE Publications (2006)
This book describes how social identification and academic learning can deeply depend on each other,...
Review of Ron Scollon and Suzie Wong Scollon, Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet, GSE Publications (2006)
This ambitious and rewarding book combines aspects of several genres. It is a methodological guidebook,...
Beyond Decontextualisation and Cynicism, GSE Publications (2006)
Some see schools primarily as places where students learn academic skills that are crucial to...
Urban Fathers Positioning Themselves through Narrative: An Approach to Narrative Self-Construction (with Vivian Gadsden), GSE Publications (2006)
Many have argued that narrators can partly construct themselves when they tell autobiographical stories. For...
Social Identification Beyond the Speech Event, GSE Publications (2005)
School socializes children into institutional and academic practices. Because socialization occurs over time, it cannot...