Making Meaning

The integrative text of Meaning-Making: Counseling and Groupwork in Education brings 40 years of research and scholarship in counseling, psychology, and education together in a singular analysis of the significant role meaning-making plays in how we come to know ourselves and others. In rejecting the modern understanding of the world as something "out there," Richard L. Hayes offers that we live in a postmodern world of our own making informed by our unique experience with that world. People are presented as self-organizing systems who are set indivisibly within changing social contexts. Development is the natural outcome of their attempts to realize a more stable and reliable understanding of that world. This meaning-making activity is positioned as an ongoing, dialectical, and recursive process of change and re-invention. The author argues that the construction of meaning is at the heart of the change process in illuminating its central role in individual development, loss, empowerment, multiculturalism, group and team development, and fostering collaboration. How these processes can be used to promote the development of deliberate democratic communities of learners illustrates how mental health professionals and educators can apply these insights to their own preparation and practice.