This book tells the story of several ninth grade students and teachers, as they developed specific identities and learned about history and literature over an academic year. It provides both a theoretical and an empirical account of how the processes of social identification and academic learning contributed to each other, such that students' identities and their learning became inextricable. In light of this inextricability, the book reexamines the traditional opposition between academic and non-academic aspects of classroom life.

Stanton Wortham is Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. He also has appointments in Anthropology, Communications and Folklore. His research applies techniques from linguistic anthropology to study interactional positioning and social identity development in classrooms. He is particularly interested in interrelations between the official curriculum and covert interactional patterns in classroom discourse, and in how the processes of learning and identity development interconnect. Dr. Wortham has written widely on classroom discourse and the linguistic anthropology of education. He has been a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow and a National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellow. In 2001 he received the American Educational Research Association Cattell Early Career Award for Programmatic Research.

1. Self/knowledge; 2. Social identification and local metapragmatic models; 3. Academic learning and local cognitive models; 4. Tyisha becoming an outcast; 5. Maurice in the middle; 6. Denaturalizing identity, learning and schooling; Appendices; References.