Book Reviews

Abstract

Stanton Wortham's Learning Identity: The Joint Emergence of Social Identification and AcademicLearning explores various sociohistorical paradigms as instantiated over multiple timescales of student identity formation. Wortham traces the progress of several students over one year in the Paideia program at Colleoni High School. The text focuses on drawing connections between curricular themes, student cognitive achievements, and the emergence of individual identity. Wortham contends that academic learning and social identification are inseparable and must be addressed jointly in instructional theory.Paideia method, as conceived in Mortimer Adler's The Paideia Proposal, engages students in a seminar-based, interactive learning environment. As Wortham explains, the Paideia program consists of three modes of learning: "didactic instruction, intellectual coaching, and seminar dialogue" (National Paideia Center). Wortham uses transcripts of classroom behavior from these seminar discussions in order to develop his provocative analysis. Paideia curriculum is divided into three sections: instruction in Paideia seminar method, instruction in theme-oriented curriculum, and development of local cognitive models based around a few chosen themes (p. 105). Salient themes in Wortham's period of analysis include civilized man versus beast and individual versus collective. Wortham examines the Paideia process using case studies that focus not only on individual students but also on the various metapragmatic models at work in the classroom. Wortham reveals that the Paideia Method's emphasis on the development of local cognitive models identifies certain students in problematic and at times damaging ways.Chapter 1, "Self/Knowledge," examines the co-occurrence of cognitive development and social identity formation. Wortham observes that local enactment of metapragmatic models frequently occurs upon assignment of group status in the classroom, using the pronoun "we"; as the teacher identifies with one group of students to the exclusion of another student or group of students, the excluded individuals are assigned roles that align with a disfavored position in the current cognitive framework. Wortham utilizes a theory of timescales of identification that allows application of various metapragmatic models to both local and generalized settings. This use of timescale helps to position events of identification within localized curricular and social contexts as well as among greater curricular themes.Chapter 2, "Social Identification and Local Metapragmatic Models," expands on the previously developed framework. Wortham introduces the model of local enactment, subsequently presented throughout the text, with the idea that a dichotomy between structure and agency does not provide an adequate theory to describe the processes of identification at work in the Padeia classroom (p. 43). Wortham instead suggests a theory of "trajectories of identification" (p. 47) that occur over the interplay between structure and agency, between metapragmatic mo...