Wortham, Stanton

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Charles F. Donovan Dean, Boston College Lynch School of Education and Human Development
Introduction
Stanton Wortham is the Charles F. Donovan, S.J., Dean of the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. He was formerly the Berkowitz Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned his B.A. with highest honors from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Human Development. His research applies techniques from linguistic anthropology to study interaction, learning and leadership development in classrooms and organizations. He has also studied media discourse and autobiographical narrative. Books include Learning Identity, Bullish on Uncertainty and Discourse Analysis beyond the Speech Event. He has most recently done research with Mexican immigrants, exploring the challenges and opportunities facing both newcomers and host communities in places where both Mexican and longstanding resident identities can be more fluid than in areas with a long history of Mexican settlement. This work has yielded films as well as traditional publications. He has been a W.T. Grant Foundation Distinguished Fellow, and he is an American Educational Research Association Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Education. He received the American Educational Research Association Cattell Early Career Research Award and the University of Pennsylvania Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. In both research and practice, he and his colleagues at Boston College are elaborating and implementing a broad vision of “formative education,” in which educators are responsible for fostering the development of whole people, including interrelations among interpersonal, emotional, ethical and spiritual dimensions.
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  • Publication
    The Heterogeneously Distributed Self
    (1999-04-01) Wortham, Stanton
    Recent work in "distributed" and "situated" cognition has moved away from psychological structure as the primary explanation for human understanding. Instead, structures at various levels of explanation - at least the linguistic, social, cultural, interactional, and mental - together constitute successful cognition. Analogously, this article argues the self is not primarily a psychological entity, but instead emerges from structures at various levels of explanation. The article focuses on the level of interactional positioning in conversation to illustrate how non-psychological structure can partly constitute the self. It focuses on the interactional positioning done by narrators as they tell stories about themselves and describes the interactional functions of autobiographical narrative discourse. Bakhtin's theory of language's interactional functions is drawn and applied to one life story.
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    Knowledge and Action in Classroom Practice: A Dialogic Approach
    (1998) Wortham, Stanton
    In 1987, Lee Shulman and Hugh Sockett had an important exchange in the Harvard Educational Review. Shulman argued for the central role of knowledge in good teaching. Sockett responded that good teaching cannot be understood as primarily a matter of knowledge and skills, because it centrally involves moral action in particular contexts. This essay sharpens the question of whether knowledge-based or action-based approaches make better sense of educational practice, by considering the power of classroom speech to communicate knowledge and to perform actions. The paper first describes M.M. Bakhtin's dialogic theory of language use - which argues not only that speech simultaneously carries content and performs actions, but also that the two functions inevitably depend on each other. It then provides an example of the interdependence of knowledge and action in an excerpt of classroom conversation. The paper concludes that knowledge-based approaches underestimate how deeply knowledge and action interpenetrate in the classroom.
  • Publication
    Linguistic Anthropology of Education
    (2008-01-01) Wortham, Stanton
    Linguistic anthropologists investigate how language use both presupposes and creates social relations in cultural context (Agha, 2006; Duranti, 1997; Silverstein, 1985). Theories and methods from linguistic anthropology have been productively applied to educational research for the past four decades. This chapter describes key aspects of a linguistic anthropological approach and reviews research in which these have been used to study educational phenomena. Readers should also consult the chapter by Betsy Rymes on Language Socialization and Linguistic Anthropology, in Volume 8 of the Encyclopedia, for a review of linguistic anthropological research in the language socialization tradition.
  • Publication
    Review of Ron Scollon and Suzie Wong Scollon, Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet
    (2006-02-01) Wortham, Stanton
    This ambitious and rewarding book combines aspects of several genres. It is a methodological guidebook, offering strategies for doing ethnography, discourse analysis and action research. It is an empirical report, describing the authors' use of email and other resources to improve Native Alaskans' access to higher education from 1978-1983. It is a theoretical account of how "people, places, discourses and objects" come together to facilitate action and social change. It also offers a theoretical sketch and empirical illustration of computer mediated communication. The book does not provide a full methodological, empirical or theoretical account, but focuses instead on the nexus of these components. The theory of social action undergirds the methodological suggestions, and the empirical material illustrates both the theory and the methodology.
  • Publication
    Students and Teachers as Novelists
    (2001-10-01) Wortham, Stanton
    Colleoni High is a large three-story brick building that occupies an entire city block. Although the custodians work diligently - so that the tile floors often shine and the bathrooms are clean - the physical plant is deteriorating. Paint peels off the ceilings in most hallways and classrooms, and the building feels old. When it was built about 50 years ago, Colleoni High enrolled primarily Catholic children from Irish and Italian backgrounds. Now the neighborhood has become predominantly African American, together with smaller but growing populations of Latino and South Asian immigrants.
  • Publication
    The Interdependence of Social Identification and Learning
    (2004-09-01) Wortham, Stanton
    When students and teachers discuss subject matter, at least two processes generally occur: Students and teachers become socially identified as recognizable types of people, and students learn subject matter. This article contributes to recent work on how social identification and learning systematically interrelate by describing one complex way in which these two processes can partly constitute each other. The article analyzes data from across an academic year in a ninth-grade classroom, exploring how one student developed a social identity through the same conversations in which students learned aspects of the curriculum.
  • Publication
    Complexities in "Similarity" in Research Interviewing: A Case of Interviewing Urban Fathers
    (2004-01-01) Wortham, Stanton; Gadsden, Vivian
    In this article we show how, whether the goal is reflecting or creating reality, research interviewers must pay closer attention to the particular trajectories of the interactional events in which they collect their data. We focus on two guidelines that research interviewers often use - the injunction to maximize similarities of social identity between interviewer and interviewee, and the injunction to share personal stories as a means of building rapport - and we show how following the same guideline in the same way can yield dramatically different results from one interview to the next. Data is drawn from research interviews conducted by young African American men with young African American men who have become fathers as teenagers. The empirical analysis shows that bids for similarity of identity within the research interviews are sometimes accepted and sometimes parried, depending on the particulars of the interactional event, thus illustrating the complexity of "similarity" of identity in research interviews.
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  • Publication
    Review of James Wilce, Eloquence in Trouble
    (2001-03-01) Wortham, Stanton
    In Eloquence in Trouble James Wilce describes how a particular speech genre is practiced in rural Bangladesh: "troubles talk," in which people lament some misfortune that has befallen them. Wilce describes how the language of laments has more than referential functions. Speakers do represent their misfortunes in lamenting them, but Wilce argues that these speakers also simultaneously reveal and shape their identities, engage in strategic interactions with interlocutors, and sometimes resist oppressive social orders. Using data from almost six years of work in Bangladesh and a substantial corpus of videorecorded troubles talk, Wilce convincingly demonstrates that laments serve multiple social and interactional functions.
  • Publication
    Conflicting Ideologies of Mexican Immigrant English Across Levels of Schooling
    (2014-04-15) Gallo, Sarah; Link, Holly; Wortham, Stanton; Allard, Elaine; Mortimer, Katherin
    This article explores how language ideologies—beliefs about immigrant students’ language use—carry conflicting images of Spanish speakers in one New Latino Diaspora town. We describe how teachers and students encounter, negotiate, and appropriate divergent ideologies about immigrant students’ language use during routine schooling practices, and we show how these ideologies convey different messages about belonging to the community and to the nation. Although the concept of language ideology often assumes stable macrolevel beliefs, our data indicate that ideologies can vary dramatically in one town. Elementary educators and students had a positive, “bilinguals-in-the-making” ideology about Spanish-speaking students, while secondary educators used more familiar deficit accounts. Despite their differences, we argue that both settings tended toward subtractive schooling, and we offer suggestions for how educators could more effectively build upon emergent bilinguals’ language skills and practices.