Stanton Wortham

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. He has most recently done research with Mexican immigrants, exploring the challenges and opportunities facing newcomers and host communities in places where both Mexican and longstanding resident identities can be more fluid than in areas with long histories of Mexican settlement. Books include Learning Identity, Bullish on Uncertainty, Discourse Analysis beyond the Speech Event, and Migration Narratives. He has been named a W.T. Grant Foundation Distinguished Fellow and an American Educational Research Association Fellow. He has received the American Educational Research Association Cattell Early Career Research Award, the University of Pennsylvania Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, and the Society for Linguistic Anthropology Sapir Book Prize. 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.