Learning Identity: The Joint Emergence of Social Identification and Academic Learning [Hardcover]

This book shows how social identification and academic learning are deeply interdependent.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.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.This book describes how social identification and academic learning can deeply depend on each other, through a theoretical account of the two processes and a detailed empirical analysis of how students' identities emerged and how students learned curriculum in one classroom. The book traces the identity development of two students across an academic year, showing how they developed unexpected identities in substantial part because curricular themes provided categories that teachers and students used to identify them and showing how students learned about curricular themes in part because the two students were socially identified in ways that illuminated those themes. The book's distinctive contribution is to demonstrate in detail how social identification and academic learning can become deeply interdependent.1. Self/knl3"