Meaning Making and Adaptive Change to Crisis

Abstract

Making meaning from experience belies all approaches to the facilitation of transformative learning in practice. This chapter provides an insight into how this process of activating epistemic transformations takes place at the front line of educational provision with students. By incorporating the theoretical basis of social constructivist learning principles, the consideration of concepts such as critical thinking, critical discourse and their relationships to heuristics and bias are used to drive the challenging of presuppositions and assumptions in self-reflective practice. The chapter considers how the functional capacities for transformation and the ability to debate existing published literature are central to the development of epistemic transformation, which transcends disciplinarity and extends into the epistemic basis of personhood. Central to the development of each, is due regard for the situational specificity of meaning making, which is used to reconcile the complex ambiguity of self-contemplation and the acknowledgement of its impact in reflective processes.