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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Now showing 1 - 10 of 80
  • Publication
    Voicing on the News: An Analytic Technique for Studying Media Bias
    (1996-10-01) Wortham, Stanton; Locher, Michael
    Speakers often evaluate others, implicitly, while apparently speaking in a neutral way about them. This article develops an account of the textual devices speakers use to communicate such implicit messages. The account draws on Bakhtin's (1981[1935]) concepts of 'voice' and 'ventriloquation.' It systematizes these concepts, by proposing five specific textual devices that speakers use to convey implicit evaluations. This account is then applied to samples of discourse from network news political coverage, specifically coverage of the 1992 US presidential election. The five devices occur robustly in this discourse. Three networks' coverage of one campaign event is analyzed in detail to illustrate how newscasters orchestrate their implicit evaluations through skillful use of the five devices.
  • Publication
    Linguistic anthropology of education: An Introduction
    (2002-10-30) Wortham, Stanton
    In "Resuscitating the Place of Educational Discourse in Anthropology," Bradley Levinson (1999) argues that cultural anthropology could benefit from research on education and that education could benefit from research on anthropology as well. He describes how contemporary cultural anthropologists, following a "cultural studies" focus on media, have not attended sufficiently to the roles schools play in cultural production and reproduction. He makes a strong case that topics of central interest to cultural anthropologists - like globalization, post-coloniality, and the cultural production of identity, could be illuminated by research on educational contexts and processes.
  • Publication
    Life as a Chord: Heterogeneous Resources in the Social Identification of One Migrant Girl
    (2013-01-01) Wortham, Stanton; Rhodes, Catherine R
    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, analysts must determine which configurations of resources become relevant in a given case. Of the many resources that might be relevant to identifying an individual, event, or setting, a few generally become salient—somewhat like several musical notes coming together to constitute a chord. We illustrate this contingent process by describing one young Mexican migrant in the USA, sketching relevant aspects of family interactions, educational practices, local community characteristics, and national discourses. This girl, her family, and other actors combine heterogeneous resources in contingent ways as they navigate and establish an emerging trajectory of identification through which she becomes a ‘good reader’.
  • Publication
    What Does Philosophy Have to Offer Education, and Who Should Be Offering It?
    (2011-12-01) Wortham, Stanton
    In this review essay Stanton Wortham explores how philosophy of education should both turn inward, engaging with concepts and arguments developed in academic philosophy, and outward, encouraging educational publics to apply philosophical approaches to educational policy and practice. He develops his account with reference to two recent ambitious projects: The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education, edited by Harvey Siegel, and the two-volume yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (NSSE), titled Why Do We Educate? edited by Gary Fenstermacher (series editor), David Coulter and John Wiens (volume 1), and Mark Smylie (volume 2). These two projects initially appear to be opposed, with the Handbook emphasizing elite philosophy and the Yearbook emphasizing public engagement. Wortham argues that each project is in fact more complex, and that they are in some respects complementary. He concludes by making a case against a simple hierarchy of basic and applied knowledge and calling for a more heterogeneous philosophy of education.
  • Publication
    Clearing Away the Self
    (2002-10-01) Michel, A. Alexandra; Wortham, Stanton
    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 compared to an alternative approach we are suggesting. Moreover, we propose that the usual narrow construal of these concepts has the unintended consequence of undermining the central constructionist goal of facilitating transformative relationships. We present an empirical example that illustrates (1) how people's conception of their self as a collection of social scripts draws their attention to and reinforces the accretion of scripts; (2) how this accretion can get in the way of transformation; and (3) how a broader conception of a 'dialogic' self can open up more direct, transformative relational possibilities.
  • 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 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
    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
    Gender and School Success in the Latino Diaspora
    (2001-11-01) Wortham, Stanton
    More and more Latinos are moving to areas of the US where few Latinos have settled before - a migration that has been called "the new Latino diaspora" (Hamann, 1999; Villenas, 1997). This paper describes an isolated community of about two hundred Latinos, located in a small rural Northern New England town that I call Havertown. When I knew them in the mid-1990s, almost all community members were Mexican immigrants or Mexican Americans who had lived in or passed through South Texas, whose families had at some recent point been involved in migrant agricultural labor, and who came from rural working-class backgrounds. Over the prior ten years they had been recruited to Havertown to work at a local meat processing plant.
  • Publication
    Denotationally cued interactional events: A special case
    (1997-09-01) Wortham, Stanton
    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 denotational functions of language. In the prototypical cases presented by Austin (1975 [1956]), an utterance signals an interactional event through the denotational value of certain predicating formulae. Uttered in appropriate circumstances, I promise both denotes and accomplishes a speech act.

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