Acting Dean of GSE:
Stanton Wortham

President Judith Rodin and Provost Robert Barchi have announced the appointment of Dr. Stanton E. F. Wortham, associate professor of education and chair of the Educational Leadership Division in the Graduate School of Education, as Acting Dean of the School for the fall, 2002 semester. He will serve in this capacity while Dean Susan Fuhrman is on a scholarly leave of absence.

Dr. Wortham, who came to Penn in 1998 from Bates College, is a member of the Graduate Groups in Education, Anthropology, and Folklore and Folklife, and a member of the Associated Faculty of the Annenberg School for Communication.

"I have every confidence that Professor Wortham will continue the excellent work of Dean Fuhrman and help to advance the Graduate School of Education further into the top echelon of graduate programs during this interim period," said President Rodin. " I am very pleased that Professor Wortham has agreed to serve; he will do an excellent job as Acting Dean," said Provost Robert Barchi. "An outstanding scholar and teacher, he has also shown exceptional leadership in the last year and a half as Chair of GSE's Educational Leadership Division," Dr. Barchi added.

Dr. Wortham's research applies the techniques of linguistic anthropology to uncover social positioning in classroom discourse. He has compiled an extraordinary record of research and publication that deepens understandings of language use and how it comes to bear on social positioning and identity formation. His research on "verbal interactional positioning" has earned him a reputation as one of the premier young scholars in the field. He teaches courses in education, culture and society; ethnographic and qualitative methods; and the linguistic anthropology of education.

Dr. Wortham is a Swarthmore College alumnus who earned his Ph.D. from the Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago in 1992. As a graduate student he was a University of Chicago Century Fellow and later was named a National Graduate (Javits) Fellow and a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow. While at Bates College, he was awarded a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship and was a recipient of the Maine Campus Compact Faculty Service-Learning Award. Last year Dr. Wortham received the Cattell Early Career Award for Programmatic Research by the American Educational Research Association. The author of two books and numerous articles, book chapters and reviews, he currently serves as book review editor of Theory & Psychology and Linguistics & Education, and is a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Latinos and Education.

During her sabbatical, Dean Fuhrman will be involved in fieldwork that studies high school responses to accountability pressures and the use of instructional assistance in six states. She will continue to chair the Management Committee of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education and will be involved at the Penn-Assisted School and in other GSE and Penn education initiatives in the region.