ABSTRACT
Pippa Stein and Bonny Norton, two White educators in South Africa, explore issues of textual meaning, testing, and pedagogy on the basis of 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 Norton 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 relationships produce multiple meanings, the authors raise important questions at the heart of testing, equity, and pedagogy.
