Wortham, Stanton

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Charles F. Donovan Dean, Boston College Lynch School of Education and Human Development

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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
    Mexicans as Model Minorities in the New Latino Diaspora
    (2009-12-01) Wortham, Stanton; Mortimer, Katherin; Allard, Elaine
    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.
  • Publication
    Sobresalir: Latino Parent Perspectives on New Latino Diaspora Schools
    (2012-01-01) Gallo, Sarah; Wortham, Stanton
    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 immigrant parents in one New Latino Diaspora community discuss their experiences with schools. Parents’ stories give teachers an opportunity to re-think their relationships with and impressions of Mexican immigrant families.
  • Publication
    Review of K. Nelson, Language in Cognitive Development
    (1998) Wortham, Stanton
    Social cognition has become a popular term, but most work under this banner applies individualistic psychology to "social" content. In contrast, Katherine Nelson's new book reframes cognition from a sociocentric perspective. Nelson presents a largely Vygotskian theory of early childhood cognitive development, describing how sociocultural context mediates cognition.
  • 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.
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  • Publication
    Listening beyond the self: How organizations create direct involvement
    (2007-08-01) Michel, Alexandra; Wortham, Stanton
    A two-year ethnographic study examines how two U.S. investment banks managed bankers' uncertainty differently and achieved distinct forms of participant transformation, including listening outcomes. People Bank reduced uncertainty by conveying abstract concepts. Socialized bankers exhibited a preferential orientation toward abstractions, including their own identities, and often failed to listen to and use concrete cues for action. To highlight situational uniqueness, Organization Bank amplified uncertainty. Since situational demands thus exceeded what the bankers knew and appeared too complex to be forced into pre-existing categories and scripts, bankers could not resort to abstractions. Over time, bankers' initial preoccupation with abstractions was cleared away, enabling them to more effectively listen and use situational cues. We develop the notion of direct involvement to explain this transformation away from self-involvement and toward heightened situational sensitivity.
  • Publication
    Interviews as Interactional Data
    (2011-02-01) Wortham, Stanton; Mortimer, Katherine; Lee, Kathleen; Allard, Elaine
    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 yield useful propositional information, and interviewers must guard against the sometimes-corrupting influence of interactional factors. But we argue that the interactional aspects of interview events can also be valuable data. Interview subjects sometimes position themselves in ways that reveal something about the habitual positioning that characterizes them or their groups. We illustrate the potential value of this interactional information by describing “payday mugging” stories told by interviewees in one New Latino Diaspora town.
  • 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
    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
    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.

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