Stanton Wortham <swortham@abacus.bates.edu>
Stanton Wortham (swortham@abacus.bates.edu)
Fri, 15 Sep 1995 12:51:52 -0400 (EDT)
My name is Stanton Wortham. I teach in the Department of Education at
Bates College, in Lewiston, Maine (USA). My research so far has been on
the details of language use in classrooms. I have been particularly
interested in how teachers and students send implicit messages and enact
implicit relational patterns -- patterns of the sort and at the level
identified by Goffman. My work differs from Goffman's in two ways.
First, I am more concerned to account for the devices speakers use to
communicate, at a micro-level. In this, I have been inspired by Michael
Silverstein's analyses of indexicality, and by some of the conversation
analysts. Second, I have tried to explore the implications that classroom
relational patterns have on students' educational experiences -- on both
their social and intellectual development. In this I have been inspired
by Vygotsky's attempt to link cognitive development to social context, by
Bakhtin's explorations of speech's inevitably social character, and by
more contemporary sociocentric theories of learning.