Social Semiotics: Theorising Meaning Making

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Clinical Education for the Health Professions

Abstract

This chapter outlines a theoretical framework to account for practices of meaning making in health care and sets out an agenda for clinical educational research. It shows how meaning making pervades all aspects of clinical work and how it can be explored and made explicit within a framework derived from social semiotics. The chapter illustrates how the framework produces accounts of the ways in which clinicians make sense of and interact with the world, in situations where they give, review, and imagine care. It explores how clinicians interpret, and communicate through, human bodies, tools, and technologies, giving meaning to, and expressing meaning through, distinct material forms. In so doing, the chapter begins to render visible the semiotic skills that clinicians develop to prepare for, provide, and evaluate clinical care.

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Correspondence to Jeff Bezemer .

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Bezemer, J. (2020). Social Semiotics: Theorising Meaning Making. In: Nestel, D., Reedy, G., McKenna, L., Gough, S. (eds) Clinical Education for the Health Professions. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6106-7_26-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6106-7_26-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-981-13-6106-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-13-6106-7

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