Social Construction of Meaning

John Yandell taught in inner London secondary schools for twenty years before moving to the Institute of Education, University of London, UK. He is the editor of Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education.

"The lasting impression of Yandell’s study is that it empowers the classroom, reminding us that classrooms, and by extension formal schooling, should not only be seen as a place to acquire knowledge but to construct, negotiate and contest meaning in a social setting. It is certainly refreshing to see a researcher present a perspective of the classroom that takes into account its social context where learning is realistically seen not as an individual accomplishment but one that involves a teacher with a group of students with different backgrounds, cultures, characters and different ways of learning. With a compressive theory-based account of rich analysis of evidence from the classroom, Yandell’s book would be beneficial to teachers, educators and researchers interested in the teaching of English, the reading of literary texts and pedagogy in general." - Jia Wei Lim, St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, Pedagogies: An International Journal, March 2015"John Yandell’s book is remarkable in the way it uses ethnographic observation of classroom discourse to make an eloquent argument for students’ authentic, embodied engagement with and response to their reading… Reading Yandell’s book, one may feel frustrated, at certain points, that the learning he describes cannot be easily assessed by conventional means. Yet, in these classrooms, culture is constantly being remade." - John Hodgson, University of the West of England, UK, English in Education Vol.49 No.3 2015

• 1: Introduction 2: Social Theories of the Sign and of Learning 3: Literacies and Literature 4: Reading Classrooms: Towards a Methodology 5: Investigating Literacy Practices within the Secondary English Classroom, or Where is the Text in this Class? 6: Literature and Representation: the Text, the Classroom and the World Outside 7:Class Readers: Exploring a Different View from the Bridge 8: Embodied Readings: the Multimodal Social Semiotic Work of the English Classroom 9: Reading Together over Time 10: Agency, Interest and Multimodal Design as Evidence of Reading 11: Mind the Gap: Investigating Test Literacy and Classroom Literacy 12: Conclusion