Learning Identity The Joint Emergence of Social Identity and Academic Learning This book describes how social identification and academic learn- ing can deeply depend on each other, through a theoretical account of the two processes and a detailed empirical analysis of how stu- dents’ 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 cat- egories 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. Stanton Wortham is Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Edu- cation. He also has appointments in Anthropology, Communica- tions, and Folklore. His research applies techniques from linguistic anthropology to study interactional positioning and social identity development in classrooms. He has also studied interactional posi- tioning in media discourse and autobiographical narrative. His publi- cations include Acting Out Participant Examples in the Classroom (1994), Narratives in Action (2001), Education in the New Latino Diaspora (2001; coedited with Enrique Murillo and Edmund Hamann) and Linguistic Anthropology of Education (2003, coedited with Betsy Rymes). More information about his work can be found at http://www.gse.upenn. edu/ ∼stantonw. © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-84588-5 - Learning Identity: The Joint Emergence of Social Identification and Academic Learning Stanton Wortham Frontmatter More information