Learning Identity
The Joint Emergence of Social Identification and Academic Learning

This book shows how social identification and academic learning are deeply interdependent.

Stanton Wortham (Author)

9780521608336, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 19 December 2005

316 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.47 kg

"...This is an important and ambitious book, which should appeal to a wide range of readers interested in what goes on in classrooms and how to study them. It balances original theoretical explorations of identity and learning with rich ethnographic accounts of classroom activity (including numerous transcripts)...Learning Identity makes a significant contribution to the study of classroom interaction, both by putting the issue of the interrelationship of learning and identity - and, more generally, pedagogy and sociology - on the research agenda, and by providing a robust set of tools for its investigation."

--Adam Lefstein, Institute of education, University of London, Linguistics and Education

"...convincing and thought-provoking...Wortham is to be applauded for his detailed and engrossing response to key contemporary questions for educational researchers about how we can conceptualise the intertwining of cognitive and social dimensions within classroom learning, how we can document ongoing social processes and how we can link up micro- and macro-level analysis..."

--Janet Maybin, Open University, United Kingdom, Linguistics and Education

"...For those of us who have followed Stanton Wortham's work, the appearance of Learning Identity synthesizes and culminates a fruitful line of inquiry that began well over 10 years ago. The book shows a leading anthropologist at the top of his game, deeply knowledgeable about school-based language practices, passionate about challenging facile educational truisms, and determined to apply the tools of his trade to illuminating how social and academic processes are necessarily intertwined...impressively detailed analysis of language-in-use...Wortham has given us a book worthy of close study, again and again and again."

--Bradley Levinson, Indiana University, Linguistics and Education

This book describes how social identification and academic learning can deeply depend on each other, both through a theoretical account of the two processes and a detailed empirical analysis of how students' identities emerge and how students learn curriculum over a year in one classroom. The book traces the identity development of two students, showing how they came habitually to occupy characteristic roles across an academic year. The book also traces two major themes from the curriculum, showing how students came to make increasingly sophisticated arguments about them. The book's distinctive contribution is to show in detail how social identification and academic learning became deeply interdependent. The two students developed unexpected identities in substantial part because curricular themes provided categories that teachers and students used to identify them. And students learned about those curricular themes in part because the two students were socially identified in ways that illuminated those themes.

1. Self/knowledge
2. Social identification and local metapragmatic models
3. Academic learning and local cognitive models
4. Tyisha becoming an outcast
5. Maurice in the middle
6. Denaturalizing identity, learning and schooling
Appendices
References.

Subject Areas: Psychology [JM]