Wortham
Biographic Data
| ID | 21045 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wortham |
| FAMILY NAME | Wortham |
| SIGNATURE | WORTHAM |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pennsylvania |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0482-1191 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 352 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Resonant Education
The articles in this symposium make two important contributions: they introduce and explain the powerful but opaque philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy; and they show how his philosophy illuminates central issues in education. Their accounts also diverge in interesting ways, raising provocative questions for the philosophy of education. The contributors describe how being with captures Nancy's core ontological claim. The basic level of human being is in…
Turning friends into objects
Making language ‘academic’
We argue that 'academic language' should not be understood as technical components associated with a 'register', and that instead we must attend to its enregisterment. Enregisterment relies upon language ideologies and models of personhood, requiring attention to social components of 'academic language' beyond lexico-grammar. We draw on ethnographic data from Latina girls in a US middle school to show how adolescence presents a unique ontogenetic…
Wholeness as a developmental goal
Human activity involves interconnections among civic, social, emotional, ethical, spiritual, and intellectual aspects. Recent advocacy for “whole person” education suggests that educators should attend to these multiple dimensions, but it does not provide an account of integration, of what “wholeness” means. We argue that those who facilitate development should encourage mutually reinforcing interconnections among various aspects of the individua…
Education, Linguistic Anthropology of
This entry reviews recent research in the linguistic anthropology of education, a subfield within linguistic anthropology. Educational processes are always mediated through language, and anthropologists have for decades studied how language and culture operate in various types of educational processes. Theories and methods from linguistic anthropology have been applied to educational activities and institutions in ways that illuminate how educati…
Black flight
Discursive struggles over migration
The Production of Schoolchildren as Enlightenment Subjects
This article investigates children’s elementary school experiences, exploring how they become autonomous, rational individuals—the type of person envisioned in the European Enlightenment and generally imagined as the outcome of Western schooling. Drawing on ethnographic research that followed one cohort of Latinx children across five years, we examine how schooling practices change across the elementary school years in a context that foregrounds …
Shifting racial stereotypes in late adolescence
Discourse Analysis beyond the Speech Event
Winner of the 2016 Edward Sapir Book Prize from the Society for Linguistic Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association Discourse Analysis beyond the Speech Event introduces a new approach to discourse analysis. In this innovative work, Wortham and Reyes argue that discourse analysts should look beyond fixed speech events and consider the development of discourses over time. Drawing on theories and methods from linguistic anthropology…
Health Literacy in Unauthorized Mexican Immigrant Mothers and Risk of Developmental Delay in their Children
Clearing Away Assumptions Through Philosophy and Research
Conflicting Ideologies of Mexican Immigrant English Across Levels of Schooling
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 nati…
Immigrant Spanish as Liability or Asset? Generational Diversity in Language Ideologies at School
Latino students’ educational success is central to America’s prosperity—in traditional immigrant destinations and in New Latino Diaspora locations, previously unfamiliar with Latinos. Implicated in this success is the reception young immigrants receive, especially the ways in which they are identified in schools. We describe findings from 6 years of ethnographic research in a high school and an elementary school in the New Latino Diaspora and des…
Editing the Visual Anthropology Section ofAmerican Anthropologist
Life as a Chord
The social and natural worlds provide heterogeneous resources that contribute both to instances of social identification and to life trajectories. One might claim or be assigned membership in various groups, which emerge at different spatial and temporal scales, and resources for social identification are often combined in novel ways to yield unexpected identities. To account for the trajectories of identification that any individual travels, ana…
The production of relevant scales
This essay explores the question of relevant scale: which of the many potentially relevant processes - from interactional through local through global, from nearly instantaneous through those emergent over months, years or centuries - in fact contributes to social identification in any given case, and how do these heterogeneous processes interrelate? Contemporary answers to this question have moved beyond the détente of the "micro-macro dialectic…
Sobresalir
Although many have documented the high value Latino families place on education, prevalent discourses nonetheless characterize Latino immigrant parents as not caring about their children's education. This paper describes the practice-based components of a participatory action research project in which we created a collaborative film, intended for use in teacher professional development, which counters these discourses. In the film, Mexican immigr…
Beyond Macro and Micro in the Linguistic Anthropology of Education
This special issue explores whether the heuristics "macro" and "micro" capture the most important levels of explanation in the anthropology of education. Recent work suggests that we must move beyond a macro-micro approach. This introduction sketches reasons for going beyond macro and micro and reviews alternative approaches to explaining cultural and educational processes. The following articles illustrate such alternatives and develop their own…
Relational Education
A Note from the Editors
Homies in the New Latino Diaspora
Interviews as interactional data
Interviews are designed to gather propositional information communicated through reference and predication. Some lament the fact that interviews always include interactional positioning that presupposes and sometimes creates social identities and power relationships. Interactional aspects of interview events threaten to corrupt the propositional information communicated, and it appears that these aspects need to be controlled. Interviews do often…
Redefining the Gap between Theory and Practice
Liam Frink is contributing editor of "Ethical Currents," the AAA Committee on Ethics column in Anthropology News
Teacher identity in the context of literacy teaching
Socialization beyond the Speech Event
Linguistic Anthropology of Education
Linguistic anthropological theories and methods have enriched our understanding of education. Almost all education is mediated by language, and linguistic anthropologists use both precise linguistic analyses and powerful anthropological theories to describe how educational language use establishes important social relations. Because educational institutions influence processes of concern to anthropologists-including the production of differential…
Interactional Positioning and Narrative Self-construction
Many have proposed that autobiographical stories do more than describe a pre-existing self. Sometimes narrators can change who they are, in part, by telling stories about themselves. But how does this narrative self-construction happen? Most explanations rely on the representational function of autobiographical discourse. These representational accounts of narrative self-construction are necessarily incomplete, because autobiographical narratives…
Mapping participant deictics
Beyond Macro and Micro in the Linguistic Anthropology of Education
This special issue explores whether the heuristics "macro" and "micro" capture the most important levels of explanation in the anthropology of education. Recent work suggests that we must move beyond a macro-micro approach. This introduction sketches reasons for going beyond macro and micro and reviews alternative approaches to explaining cultural and educational processes. The following articles illustrate such alternatives and develop their own…
From Good Student to Outcast
The process of social identification draws on heterogeneous resources from several levels of explanation. This article illustrates how, by describing the identity development of one student across an academic year in a ninth-grade classroom. Analyses of transcribed classroom conversations show teachers and students drawing on multiple resources as this student goes from being identified as one of many good students to being identified as a disrup…
Mexicans as Model Minorities in the New Latino Diaspora
Rapid Mexican immigration has challenged host communities to make sense of immigrants' place in New Latino Diaspora towns. We describe one town in which residents often characterize Mexican immigrants as model minorities with respect to work and civic life but not with respect to education. We trace how this stereotype is deployed, accepted, and rejected both by long-standing residents and by Mexican newcomers themselves. [Mexican immigration, so…
The Interdependence of Social Identification and Learning
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…
Struggling Toward Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in the Latino Diaspora
Increasing numbers of Latinos are settling in parts of the US where few Latinos have lived before. Many of these diaspora Latinos are school-age children who do not yet speak English fluently. Although rural US educators often work hard to serve Latino diaspora schoolchildren, most rural schools do not provide enough support. This article describes the successes and failures of one paraprofessional working in the Latino diaspora. By describing he…
Interviews as interactional data
Interviews are designed to gather propositional information communicated through reference and predication. Some lament the fact that interviews always include interactional positioning that presupposes and sometimes creates social identities and power relationships. Interactional aspects of interview events threaten to corrupt the propositional information communicated, and it appears that these aspects need to be controlled. Interviews do often…
Embedded metapragmatics and lying politicians
In recent years reporters have become increasingly bold in accusing politicians of lies and other moral transgressions (Wilson, 1990, Patterson (1993)). Patterson documents how this adversarial and accusatory stance by the press has increased over the past four decades. In the 1960 US presidential campaign, for instance, 75% of stories about the candidates reported "good" news. By the 1992 US presidential campaign this figure had fallen to 40%. A…
Immigrant Spanish as Liability or Asset? Generational Diversity in Language Ideologies at School
Latino students’ educational success is central to America’s prosperity—in traditional immigrant destinations and in New Latino Diaspora locations, previously unfamiliar with Latinos. Implicated in this success is the reception young immigrants receive, especially the ways in which they are identified in schools. We describe findings from 6 years of ethnographic research in a high school and an elementary school in the New Latino Diaspora and des…
The production of relevant scales
This essay explores the question of relevant scale: which of the many potentially relevant processes - from interactional through local through global, from nearly instantaneous through those emergent over months, years or centuries - in fact contributes to social identification in any given case, and how do these heterogeneous processes interrelate? Contemporary answers to this question have moved beyond the détente of the "micro-macro dialectic…
Teacher identity in the context of literacy teaching
Black flight
Sobresalir
Although many have documented the high value Latino families place on education, prevalent discourses nonetheless characterize Latino immigrant parents as not caring about their children's education. This paper describes the practice-based components of a participatory action research project in which we created a collaborative film, intended for use in teacher professional development, which counters these discourses. In the film, Mexican immigr…
Curriculum as a Resource for the Development of Social Identity
Stanton Wortham, Curriculum as a Resource for the Development of Social Identity, Sociology of Education, Vol. 76, No. 3, Special Issue on Sociology of School and Classroom Language (Jul., 2003), pp. 228-246
Homies in the New Latino Diaspora
Language in Cognitive Development
1998). Language in Cognitive Development: Emergence of the Mediated Mind. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 76-79
Shifting racial stereotypes in late adolescence
Discursive struggles over migration
Denotationally cued interactional events
Modern analyses of language use have come to focus as much on what we do with language as on what we say with it (e.g., Austin 1975 [1956]; Goffman 1974; Gumperz and Hymes 1972; Searle 1969; Wittgenstein 1953). With this shift to studying language's interactional functions has come an apparently simple question: how does a stretch of talk come to count as a particular type of interactional event? Answers to this question relied at first on the de…
The Production of Schoolchildren as Enlightenment Subjects
This article investigates children’s elementary school experiences, exploring how they become autonomous, rational individuals—the type of person envisioned in the European Enlightenment and generally imagined as the outcome of Western schooling. Drawing on ethnographic research that followed one cohort of Latinx children across five years, we examine how schooling practices change across the elementary school years in a context that foregrounds …
Clearing Away Assumptions Through Philosophy and Research
Nexus Analysis
Beyond Reasons and Causes in Social Cognition
Psychology after Dualism
Does Grammar Shape Thought
Experiencing the great books
Should American education focus on "the Great Books?" Neither side in the "canon dispute" looks closely at the relational side of great books teaching. To provide more information to use in judging great books curricula, this article presents a study of relational processes in great books classes. The results show that great books have both strengths and risks. The research focuses on how teachers involve students with the great books by connecti…
Are Constructs Personal
Mancuso (1996) accurately identifies some similarities between personal construct psychology and social constructionism. These two traditions agree that experience is mediated, and that humans have no access to the absolute truth about themselves or the world. Against Mancuso, however, I argue that the two traditions have different accounts of what is constructed and how it is constructed. Mancuso's proposed synthesis stays too close to tradition…
Mapping participant deictics
Sociocentric Accounts of the Mind
Denotationally cued interactional events
Modern analyses of language use have come to focus as much on what we do with language as on what we say with it (e.g., Austin 1975 [1956]; Goffman 1974; Gumperz and Hymes 1972; Searle 1969; Wittgenstein 1953). With this shift to studying language's interactional functions has come an apparently simple question: how does a stretch of talk come to count as a particular type of interactional event? Answers to this question relied at first on the de…
What's Social About Social Cognition? (Book)
1998). What's Social About Social Cognition? (Book) Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 248-250
Language in Cognitive Development
1998). Language in Cognitive Development: Emergence of the Mediated Mind. Mind, Culture, and Activity: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 76-79
Embedded metapragmatics and lying politicians
In recent years reporters have become increasingly bold in accusing politicians of lies and other moral transgressions (Wilson, 1990, Patterson (1993)). Patterson documents how this adversarial and accusatory stance by the press has increased over the past four decades. In the 1960 US presidential campaign, for instance, 75% of stories about the candidates reported "good" news. By the 1992 US presidential campaign this figure had fallen to 40%. A…
Interactional Positioning and Narrative Self-construction
Many have proposed that autobiographical stories do more than describe a pre-existing self. Sometimes narrators can change who they are, in part, by telling stories about themselves. But how does this narrative self-construction happen? Most explanations rely on the representational function of autobiographical discourse. These representational accounts of narrative self-construction are necessarily incomplete, because autobiographical narratives…
Clearing Away the Self
One of constructionism's chief pragmatic goals is to facilitate relationships that have transformative potential. According to Kenneth Gergen, one important theoretical tool towards that end is relational theory, the construing of human behavior in terms of dialogic processes. We trace the meaning of `dialogic' and `transformative' through different constructionist traditions and argue that these terms are used in a relatively narrow sense, as co…
Struggling Toward Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in the Latino Diaspora
Increasing numbers of Latinos are settling in parts of the US where few Latinos have lived before. Many of these diaspora Latinos are school-age children who do not yet speak English fluently. Although rural US educators often work hard to serve Latino diaspora schoolchildren, most rural schools do not provide enough support. This article describes the successes and failures of one paraprofessional working in the Latino diaspora. By describing he…
Curriculum as a Resource for the Development of Social Identity
Stanton Wortham, Curriculum as a Resource for the Development of Social Identity, Sociology of Education, Vol. 76, No. 3, Special Issue on Sociology of School and Classroom Language (Jul., 2003), pp. 228-246
The Interdependence of Social Identification and Learning
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…
From Good Student to Outcast
The process of social identification draws on heterogeneous resources from several levels of explanation. This article illustrates how, by describing the identity development of one student across an academic year in a ninth-grade classroom. Analyses of transcribed classroom conversations show teachers and students drawing on multiple resources as this student goes from being identified as one of many good students to being identified as a disrup…
Socialization beyond the Speech Event
Nexus Analysis
Linguistic Anthropology of Education
Linguistic anthropological theories and methods have enriched our understanding of education. Almost all education is mediated by language, and linguistic anthropologists use both precise linguistic analyses and powerful anthropological theories to describe how educational language use establishes important social relations. Because educational institutions influence processes of concern to anthropologists-including the production of differential…
Teacher identity in the context of literacy teaching
Mexicans as Model Minorities in the New Latino Diaspora
Rapid Mexican immigration has challenged host communities to make sense of immigrants' place in New Latino Diaspora towns. We describe one town in which residents often characterize Mexican immigrants as model minorities with respect to work and civic life but not with respect to education. We trace how this stereotype is deployed, accepted, and rejected both by long-standing residents and by Mexican newcomers themselves. [Mexican immigration, so…
Redefining the Gap between Theory and Practice
Liam Frink is contributing editor of "Ethical Currents," the AAA Committee on Ethics column in Anthropology News
Relational Education
A Note from the Editors
Sociology (32 works) · Psychology (30 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Multilingual Education and Policy (15 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Political science (13 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (11 works) · Linguistics (11 works) · Pedagogy (11 works)