An important aspect of collaborative learning is the move from assimilation to construction, i.e., creating new understandings based on the discussions that they have had.
Whereas the emphasis in meaning making is on creating new understandings and identities, taking refuge in the habitual is a related yet contrasting process of holding on and retreating from engaging directly.
Despite efforts on the part of research and practice communities to create new understanding and be at the cutting edge of science, the vast scope and highly diverse nature of relevant research concepts, theories, methodologies, and empirical findings make it difficult to take stock of DRR knowledge.
These interactive processes of collective knowledge construction occur when a group of individuals creates new understanding by taking up each other's contributions and combining them into new insights.
Dr. Lederberg's discovery that bacteria engage in sex created new understandings of how bacteria evolve and acquire new traits, including resistance to antibiotic drugs.
Though life ultimately proves fragile and fleeting, the best of humanity occurs when we band together and create new understandings that allow us to spend that time with the ones we love.
Several of the methods used in The Macho Factory are inspired by drama education, with the basic notion that enactment in itself creates new understandings and enables changed behaviour (Byréus 2012).
Now in the health field, social innovations in the organisation of services and care, and in the prevention of disease through changing behaviours and social determinants, are creating new ways of understanding and controlling both the physical and the social worlds.
Each of these researchers is creating new knowledge and advancing understanding of the world around us.
Only by discovering the tradition's hidden heritage can we hope to reshape our communal sense of what is and what matters, thereby redrawing the basic contours of this tradition and so creating new possibilities for human understanding and action.
