Jerome Bruner, Meaning-Making and Education for Conflict Resolution: Why How We Think Matters

The way we think about things matters just as much as what we think about things. This timely text investigates the work of educational philosopher and psychologist Jerome Bruner through the areas of knowledge representation, meaning-making, education and dispute. What people represent to others might not always be what they actually think. However, accepting this limitation, the aim of this book is to offer a means of examining representations about a given subject and an understanding of how those representations might change over time in response to learning, crisis, and encounter with ‘other’. Myers offers an educational intervention that invites development of representations in response to difference. Presenting a new framework for examining controversy between worldviews and a method for creating space for difference, the book brings this into dialogue with education and research, conflict resolution and religion. This framework maps representations and proposes a method of engaging the psychological processes involved in changing representations. An excellent resource of interest to researchers, professionals and postgraduate students alike in education, sociology and philosophy related disciplines.