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

Wortham, Stanton

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521845882 ISBN 13: 9780521845885

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2006

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521845882
• ISBN 13: 9780521845885
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 316