ABSTRACT
Systemic thinking is a way to make sense of the relatedness of everything around us. In its broadest application, it is a way of thinking that gives practitioners the tools to observe the connectedness of people, things, and ideas: everything connected to everything else. Social constructionism emerged from a different academic tradition and poses different types of questions. Its roots lie in the field of sociology and, in particular, George Mead's "symbolic interactionism", which offered the view that we construct our own identities through interaction with others. The philosophical tradition of post-structuralism led various thinkers to reconsider the modernist view of a truth "out there" waiting to be discovered, and literary critics such as Bakhtin suggested that the meaning of literary texts did not reside in intention of the author or the embedded structures of the text itself, but, rather, in the way that the reader constructed his or her own meaning from within his own temporal and cultural context.
