Why the "Monkeys Passage" Bombed: Tests, Genres, and Teaching

Abstract

Pippa Stein and Bonny Norton Peirce, two White educators in South Africa, explore issues of textual meaning, testing, and pedagogy based on their experience piloting a reading test to be used as a college entrance examination for Black students. Drawing on Stein's personal experience administering the test and on literature in the fields of genre analysis and textual interpretation, Stein and Peirce question the test's meaning and validity. The authors discuss how the students' interpretations of the text differed as Stein altered the social context, illustrating the ways in which the politics of different social occasions contribute to the production of multiple meanings. In their exploration of how shifting power relations produce multiple meanings, the authors raise important questions at the heart of testing, equity, and pedagogy.