Learning Identity: The Joint Emergence of Social Identification and Academic Learning

Description

This book describes how social identification and academic learning can deeply depend on each other, both through a theoretical account of the two processes and a detailed empirical analysis of how students' identities emerge and how students learn curriculum over a year in one classroom. The book traces the identity development of two students, showing how they came habitually to occupy characteristic roles across an academic 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.

Stanton Wortham is Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. He also has appointments in Anthropology, Communications and Folklore. His research applies techniques from linguistic anthropology to study interactional positioning and social identity development in classrooms. He is particularly interested in interrelations between the official curriculum and covert interactional patterns in classroom discourse, and in how the processes of learning and identity development interconnect. Dr. Wortham has written widely on classroom discourse and the linguistic anthropology of education. He has been a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow and a National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellow. In 2001 he received the American Educational Research Association Cattell Early Career Award for Programmatic Research.

"Stanton Wortham has written a fascinating account of ... the realities of growing up in a heterogeneous society ... It deserves the attention of all who are involved with the education of adolescents and young adults" -Contemporary Psychology "This study offers rich empirical work and theoretical explanations to grasp the complexities involved in the interdependence of social identification and cognitive learning in schooling. Grounding his work in the analysis of language events in context, the author provides detailed clarifications for the interconnections of these activities and processes." -Anthropology and Education Quarterly "In a riveting study, Wortham demonstrates how social identification and academic learning are interrelated much more than we likely suspect, and certainly much more than we act upon on a daily basis...The import of this study to language education is significant...The book is appropriate for graduate courses in education, teacher education, and educational studies." -Terry A. Osborn, Fordham University, Language Problems & Language Planning