Stanton Wortham

Stanton E. F. Wortham, Ph.D. is an American professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, published author, and a founding scholar in the subfield of "linguistic anthropology of education." ^[1]

Biography

Dr. Stanton is currently serving as the Dean of the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. ^[2] Wortham served as the Judy and Howard Berkowitz Professor of Education at the Graduate School of Education and is the current Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. An interdisciplinary researcher, Wortham's work involves discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, sociology, and cultural psychology. He has published widely on classroom discourse and the linguistic anthropology of education and serves on the editorial boards of the academic journals Theory & Psychology, Linguistics & Education, Mind, Culture & Activity, Critical Discourse Studies, Discourse Processes, Pedagogies, and Anthropology & Education Quarterly.^[3]

Wortham’s research utilizes techniques from linguistic anthropology to study social positioning in spoken language. His work describes how classroom interactions can both help students learn subject matter and create social identities for teachers and students, thus exploring the interrelations between academic learning and the development of social identities. Some of Wortham's most important work studies the New Latino Diaspora and specifically looks at the experiences of Mexican immigrant students both in and out of school as they transition to neighborhoods without a history of Latino presence.^[4] Wortham’s research approach involves action research and service learning, ethnography in urban and rural high schools and surrounding communities.^[5]

Wortham's notable publications include Learning Identity: The Joint Emergence of Social Identification and Academic Learning - the best statement of his work on classroom discourse - and Bullish on Uncertainty: How Organizational Cultures Transform Participants, a book co-authored with Alexandra Michel of the University of Southern California and published in 2009. Bullish on Uncertainty that explores how two different banking firms utilized the principles of uncertainty. During their study, Michel and Wortham discovered that the banking firm that functioned with some uncertainty and seemed to ignore traditional principles of management actually fared better than the firm that minimized uncertainty and functioned according to the rules.^[6] Taking a cultural-historical approach to psychological development, the authors relate this phenomenon to the relationship between corporate culture and development of a personal identity.^[7]

In 1997, Wortham received the first annual Maine Campus Compact Faculty Service-Learning Award, and in 2001 he received the American Educational Research Association Cattell Early Career Award for Programmatic Research. In 2008, Wortham was named a W.T. Grant Foundation Distinguished Fellow and in 2009 he was named an American Educational Research Association Fellow. Wortham has also been a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow and a National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellow.^[3]

Wortham has served as Associate Dean at Penn GSE since 2004 and also has appointments at the Annenberg School for Communication and the Anthropology and Folklore Graduate Groups in the School of Arts and Sciences, both at the University of Pennsylvania.^[3]

Theories

Wortham called for a Dialogic Approach to analyzing the meaning of utterances, by which he means contextualization. Specifically, the dialogic approach studies mediation, emergence and interactional positioning, voicing (double voicing and ventriloquation) and contextualization cues, to define context, frame the narrative event within the narrated event and vice versa to essentially determine meanining in and of an utterance.

References

External links

• University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education
• Understanding New Immigrant Communities