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

Wortham, Stanton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521608333 ISBN 13: 9780521608336

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2005

Synopsis

This book describes how social identification and academic learning can deeply depend on each other, through a theoretical account of the two processes and a detailed empirical analysis of how students' identities emerged and how students learned curriculum in one classroom. The book traces the identity development of two students across an academic year, showing how they developed unexpected identities in substantial part because curricular themes provided categories that teachers and students used to identify them and showing how students learned about curricular themes in part because the two students were socially identified in ways that illuminated those themes. The book's distinctive contribution is to demonstrate in detail how social identification and academic learning can become deeply interdependent.

About this title

Book Description:

This book tells the story of several ninth grade students and teachers, as they developed specific identities and learned about history and literature over an academic year. It provides both a theoretical and an empirical account of how the processes of social identification and academic learning contributed to each other, such that students' identities and their learning became inextricable. In light of this inextricability, the book reexamines the traditional opposition between academic and non-academic aspects of classroom life.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0521608333
• ISBN 13: 9780521608336
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 316