TLC: Liberal Education and Reflective Practices

Workshop facilitator Michael Bamberg will redress the role of ‘reflection’ for teaching and learning in Higher Education. More specifically, he will guide workshop participants through a number of reflective practices that are said to serve deep and life-long learning, drawing on a number of pedagogic experiments - such as working with portfolios, peer-learning assistants, and attempts to empower student learning through self-grading.

Michael is currently at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan as Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Humanities and Social Sciences.

About Michael Bamberg

Michael was a student of sociolinguist/anthropologist Robert B. LePage (York), John Gumperz (Berkeley), and Shirley Brice Heath (Stanford), and completed his PhD in Psychology (‘Narrative Development’) under the mentorship of Elinor Rosch, Susan Ervin-Tripp, and Dan Slobin (all Berkeley). His interest in Qualitative Inquiry originated with his Assistant Professorship in the Sociology Department (1981-85) under the leadership of Martin Kohli (FU Berlin), and from there developed into a lifelong passion, bridging into the scholarship for which he became known. Since 1986, he teaches Psychology at Clark University (Adjunct: English), where he developed ‘Qualitative Inquiry,’ a required course for undergraduate majors in Psychology. This course is featured in YouTube lectures leading to his recruitment for the APA Publications and Communications Task Force on Qualitative Research for the new edition of the APA Publication Manual (2019), which, for the first time, includes guidelines for the reporting of qualitative methods in psychology and epistemological perspectives on research reporting.

Michael has been an important figure in the promotion of a series of different genres of applied linguistic, narrative and identity research. From his dissertation work on the acquisition of narratives (1987), through positioning theory (1997a, 2003) and analysis of narratives (2011b, 2012), to identity construction in talk-in-interaction (2011b, 2011c; Bamberg, De Fina & Schiffrin, 2011; Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008), he has contributed varied strands to psychology, applied linguistics and identity theory (2011; De Fina, Schiffrin & Bamberg, 2006; Bamberg, De Fina, & Schiffrin, 2007, 2011). He is the founding editor of the journal Narrative Inquiry through which he supported and encouraged theorizing and research into narrative from differing perspectives for over 20 years. In addition, he also served as the series editor of Studies in Narrative consisting for a series of books at the cutting edge of narrative research. Currently, he is under contract with Cambridge University Press (with C. Demuth, Aalborg, and M. Watzlawick, Berlin), tasked with the edition of the Cambridge Handbook of Identity (CUP, 2020). After serving his home institution recently as Associate Dean of the College & Director of the Center for Enhancement of Teaching & Learning, he is preparing for his Fulbright Fellowship as Distinguished Chair in Humanities and Social Sciences at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan – followed by his (well-deserved) sabbatical in 2020 – for which he is open to explore the world.

Source: https://wordpress.clarku.edu/mbamberg/