The Social Construction of Meaning

Reading literature in urban English classrooms

John Yandell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135006587
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book takes a fresh look at secondary urban English classrooms and at what happens when students and their teachers explore literature collaboratively. By closely examining what happens in English lessons, minute by minute, it reveals how literary texts function not as a valorised heritage to be transmitted, but as a resource for the students

Chapter 1
Introduction

What happens when literature is read in urban English classrooms? What processes and activities are involved? How is meaning made? What is the value of such reading? Is it merely a poor substitute for the private reading of individual, independent readers? And how should students’ reading of literature be assessed?

In what follows, I attempt to address these questions. Drawing on data gathered through classroom observation, I explore the meanings that are made collaboratively by students and teachers in interaction with literary texts. I make the claim that there are, in the urban English classrooms that I have observed, literacy practices that merit attention because of what they reveal about the possibilities of learning through an engagement with literature.

In this opening chapter, I set out the parameters of my research and indicate something of the history of my interest in the subject. Before doing so, though, it might be helpful to clarify some of the terms employed to describe this interest. I use ‘urban’ as shorthand for a series of interlocking characteristics of schools in inner-city areas: their comprehensive (non-selective) intake; the multicultural, multilingual student population; the predominance of children from working-class families; high levels of poverty (see also Anderson and Summerfield 2004; Hill 2004; Kress et al. 2005).

In focusing attention on the reading of ‘literary texts’ I do not intend to signal that I regard the category of the literary, or literature, as unproblematic: what constitutes the text, and how it might be thus constituted, are questions that continue to exercise me. To some extent, my interest is in the reading of literary texts because those are still the texts most widely and most often read within secondary English classrooms. My argument, though, is that literary texts are read in these classrooms in ways that open up distinct possibilities for the readers – possibilities of learning and development, possibilities of social semiotic work. The argument is not, however, that these possibilities are inherent in the texts themselves – in their literary qualities, say – but rather that the possibilities arise out of the kinds of engagement with the text, out of ways of reading that are deeply historied.

To suggest that these ways of reading might be construed as a ‘literacy practice’ is, in part, to acknowledge that what I describe is susceptible to a kind of ethnographic analysis: it is to make the claim that there are regularities in the phenomena that I observe, and that these regularities amount to an identifiable practice (or set of practices) involving a group of participants (students and teachers). Implicit in this claim is another, more fundamental, one, that there are different ways of reading, different ways of doing things with texts: that, in other words, there is not a single, universal form of literacy but rather a variety of different, and differently situated, literacy practices.

The autobiography of the question¹

My interest in reading, or rather readings, predates my experience of London classrooms. In what really does seem like a former life, I spent several years puzzling about the audiences that populated the London theatres in the years leading up to the English Revolution. These audiences were constituted in difference; they were representative, particularly in the ‘public’, open theatres such as the Globe, of a broad cross-section of the population of London; they were sophisticated, knowing consumers of the multimodal texts that were performed for their benefit (and the sharers’ profit). A play like John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, a self-conscious reworking of Romeo and Juliet in which the lovers are reconfigured as brother and sister, depends for its effect on the existence of an audience that recognises it as such – an audience that is capable of reading its representation of incest within the context of an established theatrical tradition – not a canon, but certainly a repertoire of familiar dramatic texts. The extent to which the experience of theatre had become, as it were, both common culture and common representational currency can be gauged, with the closure of the theatres in 1642 and the removal of close state censorship of the printing presses, by the astonishing frequency with which theatre reappears as a structuring metaphor in the political and religious pamphlets of the 1640s (Butler 1984; Gurr 1987; Heinemann 1980).

I was interested, then, in the theatres of early seventeenth-century London as places of cultural and political activity and transformation. I wanted to understand more about the relationship between the worlds represented by the plays (particularly the city comedies of Jonson, Dekker, Middleton and Brome) and the lifeworlds of their audiences. So what seemed important to me was less the texts in and of themselves than the effect that the texts (in performance) had on their audiences – and what their audiences made of them.

When, in the mid-1980s, I started work as a teacher in an inner London school, it was the unmissable fact of the diversity of the student body that interested me – and it was precisely this diversity which refocused my earlier preoccupation with the meanings that readers (or audiences) make of texts. In the multicultural environment of a London classroom, the consideration of what readers bring to texts, of the interface between textual and extratextual reality, and of the complex play of intertextuality, was no longer a fraught and frustrating exercise in theatrical archaeology but rather an everyday part of teaching and learning (Burgess 1984, 1988; Burgess and Hardcastle 1991). One of my first experiences as a newly-qualified teacher, working at a boys’ school in East London, was of teaching a unit of work on storytelling to a class of 30 12- and 13-year-old students, all but two of whom were of Bangladeshi heritage. Underprepared and casting around for a story to tell, I chose King Lear. I had got no further than ‘Once there was an old king who had three daughters’ when I was interrupted. ‘We know this story,’ the boys informed me, as one, ‘it’s Bengali.’ Graciously, they allowed me to continue, only occasionally pointing out where I had got my facts wrong.

Throughout the 20 years I spent as a teacher in inner London secondary schools, I continued to be fascinated by the ways in which students would illuminate and make sense of the literature that they encountered in the classroom, making meanings that were informed by their subjectivities, lives, cultures and histories. For the young women of Turkish and Kurdish heritage with whom I read Romeo and Juliet at a school in Hackney, East London, Juliet’s attempts to negotiate the contradictions in her relationships with her family and her lover were often all too recognisable, all too close to their own lifeworlds (Yandell 1995). In other cases, with other texts, the correspondences were less obvious, less direct: I have written elsewhere about teaching The Merchant of Venice in the same Hackney school, and about one student in particular, Hong Hai, whose writing in role as Shylock, reflecting on his daughter’s elopement with a Christian, seemed to me to be simultaneously drawing on her own experiences to shed light on the Shakespearean character and using the distancing perspective of the role to explore her own feelings, her complex cultural positioning (Yandell 1997a).

As a student teacher, I had encountered the Bullock Report’s exhortation regarding the relationship between schools and their communities, between students’ identities in school and in the outside world, between the learning that happens within and beyond the school gates (DES 1975, and see Chapter 6). At the time, I had welcomed this commitment to a principle, a view of the place of schooling in the wider society that I shared, and the report’s attempt to address questions of what would constitute appropriate provision for ‘Children from Families of Overseas Origin’ (DES 1975: Chapter 20). Almost at the same time as I started teaching, however, a very different conception of the relationship of the curriculum to the cultures of school students was being articulated. It was expressed most clearly in the consultation document that preceded the imposition of the National Curriculum in England and Wales, which announced that the National Curriculum was intended to ensure ‘access to broadly the same good and relevant curriculum and programmes of study’ (DES 1987: 4). In this paradigm, the school curriculum derives its validity not from its responsiveness to local interests but from its universality. Equality of opportunity is to be delivered through access to a homogenous, preformed entity, the already-specified curriculum.

The centralised model of the curriculum, promoted by the 1987 consultation document and by the earlier HMI Curriculum Matters publications (DES 1984), has maintained a hegemonic position in policy throughout the following three decades, and has been a vital constituent in the standards-based reforms throughout that time (Apple 1996, 2001, 2004; Barber 1996; Darling-Hammond 2004; Hatcher and Jones 1996; Jones 1989, 2003; Lawton and Chitty 1988; Plaskow 2004). It continues to underpin more recent policy pronouncements around the theme of ‘personalisation’, to the extent that personalisation has been carefully defined as a set of increasingly individualised interventions to ensure access to the same pre-specified curricular goals (Boston 2007).

Implicit in the 1987 consultation document’s notion of ‘access’ is a particular pedagogy, one that was rendered more explicit in the increasingly frequent appearance of the phrase ‘pupils should be taught to . . .’ in subsequent versions of the National Curriculum (DES/Welsh Office 1990; DfE/Welsh Office 1995; DfEE 1999a, 1999b). The assumption is that what is learnt is equivalent to what is taught, that knowledge can be transmitted, and that, in effect, a curriculum can be delivered (like a sack of potatoes). Learning is conceptualised as linear, measurable and the property of the individual learner.

I worry about approaches to teaching and learning that fail to take sufficient account of the subjectivities of the learner, that fail, therefore, to conceptualise teaching and learning as relational, socioculturally situated practices. I want to explore approaches to pedagogy that are more conscious of the agency of the learners and I want to suggest that there is a pressing need to look closely (and critically) at the ways in which the current discipline-based curriculum is negotiated and instantiated in urban classrooms.

Part of what seems to me deeply problematic about curriculum policy post-Bullock is that it does not reflect my experience in the (multicultural, urban) classroom. What attracted me, more than 20 years ago, to Bullock’s advice that students should not be ‘expected to cast off the language and culture of the home’ was that it gestured at a more inclusive, pluralist conception of schooling. In other words, my initial reaction was an ideological one, supportive of what appeared to me to be a move in the direction of a more socially just education system. What I did not appreciate then, I think, was the force of Bullock’s words in relation to pedagogy: students do not simply cast off their out-of-school identities and histories as they enter the classroom. I make this claim on the basis of experience, but also because of what seem to me to be centrally important philosophical arguments about the resources that people use to make sense of things; these arguments, traceable to the Bakhtin/Vološinov circle of cultural and linguistic theorists, insist that the act of interpretation is never abstract but must always, necessarily, stand in a specific historical relationship to the text. I develop this point in Chapters 2 and 3. The question is, therefore, what opportunities are there for students to draw on these cultural resources in their learning within the classroom? The danger of that one word, ‘regardless’, deployed in 1987 in the preparation for the National Curriculum and since reiterated in hundreds of school mission statements, is that it encourages an approach to curriculum and pedagogy that is inattentive to such cultural resources.

I referred above to the ways in which my school students had read (and responded to) King Lear, Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice. It is because of such experiences that I want to argue for the importance of approaches to curriculum and pedagogy, specifically within the field of English, that are properly attentive to the cultural resources that students bring with them to the classroom. I want to argue for a conception of the classroom as a dialogic, multi-accented space, within which the activity of reading literature is not neatly separable from a complex web of sociocultural relationships, not separable from issues of power and the contestation of power. And I want to argue for a conceptualisation of the activity of reading as fully, irreducibly social.²

Of course, the position that I seek to occupy and defend is not in any simple sense the product of experience. Experience – the 20 years I have spent as a classroom teacher in London schools, or the time that I now spend visiting my PGCE students as they begin to grapple with the complexities of urban classrooms – might be a great teacher, but what it teaches depends on how it is framed, on the theoretical and political lenses through which it is viewed. I have already gestured at a commitment to social justice – a commitment that preceded and partly motivated my move into teaching in London – as well as a prior interest in reading positions and in approaches to reading that tend to destabilise the text. Such interests and commitments were nourished, deepened and concretised by my experience as a teacher and as an active trade unionist, by my participation over two decades in the work of the National Union of Teachers, by my involvement in a series of campaigns on educational questions, by my editorship, for much of this time, of Socialist Teacher, the journal of the Socialist Teachers’ Alliance. My analysis, then, comes from a particular perspective.

When training to be a teacher, I also read Shirley Brice Heath’s Ways with Words (1983). Its careful analysis of the diversity of literacy practices within distinct communities helped me to look at literacy differently in the classrooms where I worked. It provided me with an alternative to the model of a single, universal, linear scale of literacy development, the model which has had, within the past two or three decades, hegemonic status within public and policy discourse around the field of literacy.

The theoretical field

My interest in the ways in which literary texts are read in urban classrooms places my work at the intersection of separable but related theoretical fields. I draw upon work in these fields in order to address the question of how such reading might be described and theorised.

The first field is sometimes referred to as the New Literacy Studies. Investigating the plurality of (local, domain-specific) literacies, its practitioners have tended to focus on sites outside mainstream schooling; often, indeed, the literacies explored have been explicitly counterposed to the paradigm of mainstream/dominant/schooled literacy (Barton and Hamilton 1998; Barton et al. 2000; Baynham 1995; Boyarin 1993; Brice Heath 1983; Cope and Kalantzis 2000; Gee 2004; Gee et al. 1996; Gregory 1996, 2004; Gregory and Williams 2000a, 2000b; Prinsloo and Breier 1996; Street 1984, 1995, 2001). The insights derived from these studies, their insistence on the situated – and ideological – nature of all literacies, together with their use of ethnographic approaches, inform the approach I have taken to my research and provided me with a fresh way of thinking about literacy practices in the classroom.

More recently, there has been a particularly significant development from literacy studies, a broadening of focus to include a much wider range of semiotic resources and practices. Gunther Kress and others have developed multimodal social semiotics both as a theory of semiotic activity and also as, in effect, a research methodology. Unlike most researchers associated with the New Literacy Studies, Kress and his collaborators have focused attention on schools and classrooms as sites of semiotic activity, though largely concentrating on the role of the teacher (Kress 1997, 2003; Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001; Kress et al. 2001, 2005). My research makes use of multimodality as a research tool, but devotes as much attention to the activity of the school students as it does to the teachers involved.

The second theoretical strand of my analysis, as indicated above, draws on aspects of literary and broader semiotic theory. Any account of developments over the past century must, necessarily, greatly simplify the bewildering variety of strands that have emerged. For my purposes here, however, it is important to note that the dominant trajectory of literary theory since New Criticism has been away from the model of the text as stable, isolable, knowable and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 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
• Bibliography
• Index