Dean Stanton Wortham
An award-winning teacher, scholar, and documentary film producer, Stanton E. F. Wortham, Ph.D., comes to the Lynch School of Education and Human Development as its inaugural Charles F. Donovan, S.J., Dean from the University of Pennsylvania鈥檚 Graduate School of Education, where he was the Judy and Howard Berkowitz Professor and associate dean for academic affairs.
A linguistic anthropologist and educational ethnographer with a particular expertise in how identities develop in human interactions, Wortham has conducted research spanning education, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, sociology, and philosophy. He is the author or editor of nine books and more than 80 articles and chapters that cover a range of topics including linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, 鈥渓earning identity鈥� (how social identification and academic learning interconnect), and education in the new Latino diaspora.听
He spent 18 years as a professor and administrator at Penn, where he served twice as interim dean of the Graduate School of Education and won multiple awards for teaching excellence, including the University of Pennsylvania Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching.
For the last 10 years, Wortham has studied the experiences of Mexican immigrant students both in and outside of school as they adjusted to lives in communities with largely non-Latino听populations.听
As part of that project, he was the executive producer of the award-winning 2014 documentary听Adelante, which chronicles how a Mexican-immigrant and Irish-American community are revitalizing a once-struggling parish. In 2020, Bloomsbury Academic published听Migration Narratives: Diverging Stories in Schools, Churches, and Civic Institutions, a book听Wortham coauthored听based on research in the small town.
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Research Interests
Discourse analysis is a broad and complex interdisciplinary field. It includes diverse theoretical and methodological approaches from linguistics, anthropology, and sociology. All approaches to discourse share a commitment to studying language in context. But "context" is notoriously indeterminate, and different approaches to discourse analysis emphasize different aspects of context as potentially relevant to understanding language use. Wortham's approach to discourse analysis draws primarily on work in linguistic anthropology, although the central insights were originally developed in sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and in fields beyond the human sciences ranging from literary criticism to philosophy.
Related Publication
, 2nd edition (Routledge, 2021)听(Stanton听Wortham & Angela Reyes)
Linguistic anthropologists study the role language plays in culturally patterned behavior. Contemporary linguistic anthropology has become a particularly fertile field both in its theoretical insights and in its empirical contributions.
Related Publications:听
听(Stanton听Wortham & Betsy Rymes, Editors). Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.
听2008.听Annual Review of Anthropology,听37, 37-51.
听2012.听Anthropology &听Education Quarterly, 43, 128-137.
In much of Wortham's work, he has studied how people adopt, or get assigned, particular identities through speech. Most of this work involves detailed discourse analysis, analyzing either classroom or autobiographical narrative data. Some of it is ethnographic, based on research in the New Latino Diaspora.
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听New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
听2010.听Teachers College Record, 112, 2848鈥�2871.
听2013.听Applied Linguistics, 34, 536-553. (Stanton听Wortham听& Catherine Rhodes).
Many have claimed that the self gets constructed in narrative discourse. Using a systematic approach to analyzing narrative, Wortham has asked: how do narrators partly construct themselves while telling autobiographical narratives?听
Related Publications:听
听New York: Teachers College Press, 2001.
听2001.听Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 45,听126-137.
听2003.听Journal of Linguistic听Anthropology,听13, 1-22.
听2011.听Journal of Linguistic Anthropology,听21,听E56-E75. (Stanton听Wortham, Elaine Allard, Kathy Lee & Katherine Mortimer).
In what Enrique Murillo and Sofia Villenas have called the 鈥淣ew Latino Diaspora鈥濃�� areas without traditional Latino presence to which Latinos have increasingly moved over the past 15 years鈥攎ore positive models of immigrant identity often have space to take hold. In areas of long-standing Latino settlement, negative stereotypes about immigrant groups have often become entrenched. Mexican immigrants in these areas often confront physical and symbolic segregation along ethnic and class lines, and longstanding residents often employ beliefs and practices that have supported unequal ethnic relations.
Related Publications:听
听2009.听Anthropology & Education听Quarterly, 40, 388-404. (Stanton听Wortham, Katherine Mortimer & Elaine Allard)
听2011.听Language & Communication, 31, 191-202. (Stanton Wortham, Katherine Mortimer & Elaine Allard).听
听2012.听Applied Linguistics Review, 3,听75-99. (Stanton听Wortham听& Catherine Rhodes).
听(Edmund Hamann, Stanton听Wortham听& Enrique Murillo, Editors). Charlotte: Information Age Publishing, 2015.
Dean Wortham in Action
Featured guest on the Series of GEDF Deans' Vision of Shared Education Futures