Introduction

[Stanton Wortham]

As a linguistic anthropologist of education, I teach social foundations
and ethnographic methods in the Graduate School of Education at the
University of Pennsylvania.  My doctorate is from the University of
Chicago, where I worked with Michael Silverstein and Rick Shweder.  In
my empirical work I have analyzed classroom discourse, media discourse
and self-narrative discourse.

Here's a blurb on current research:

I study the interactional functions of classroom discourse, with
particular attention to the complex relational events that go on under
the surface of apparently neutral classroom discussion.  I am interested
in the linguistic mechanisms through which such relational events get
created, in the social consenquences of such interaction in the
classroom, and in how these interactional patterns interrelate with the
official curriculum.  Recently I have also begun working on how
narrators "create" themselves while telling narratives of personal
experience.  I argue that a performative or "dialogic" approach to
narrative can best explain self-narratives' power to construct the self.
I am particularly interested in how immigrant and minority adolescents
represent their past, present, and future selves in narrative and in how
they relate themselves to educational institutions.
--
Stanton Wortham
Graduate School of Education
University of Pennsylvania
3700 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6216
(215) 898-6307