Professor Parker will be sharing her recent book 'Taking Flight: Making Your Center for Teaching and Learning Soar', emerging from her work in the Center for Teaching Excellence and Faculty Leadership, at UNC-Wilmington.

Michele's work centres around transforming departmental culture, such as 'Empowering a department through Appreciative Inquiry', and will include her recent cross-continental work on course design between Ethiopia and the USA.

Please join us if you are interested in school leadership at any level, as well as in learning more about appreciative inquiry approaches to staff development in different cultural contexts.

Michele's Context

Leveraging my strengths, in 2014, I became the Interim Associate Director for the Center for Teaching Excellence & Faculty Leadership at UNC Wilmington.
 

Later, I became an Ambassador's Distinguished Scholar in Ethiopia. The program aims to strengthen staff capacity to teach and manage undergraduate and graduate programs and enhance research capacity within Ethiopian universities.
 

Upon returning to the United States, I co-authored the book, "Taking Flight: Making your Center for Teaching and Learning Soar." What do these experiences have in common? The answer is using my strengths and turning my failures into successes.
 

We will discuss how I continue to use Appreciative Inquiry to strengthen and align mentoring processes for staff development in the Department of Educational Leadership. This action has positively impacted culture while helping achieve individual and institutional goals. How can you leverage your strengths?

Biography

Michele Parker is from Brooklyn, NY. She was a non-traditional college student at SUNY Stonybrook.

Encouraged by the excellent mentoring received in college, Parker pursued a Master’s degree in Higher Education and Student Affairs Administration. Later she earned a Ph.D. in Research, Statistics, and Evaluation at the University of Virginia and then joined the faculty at UNC Wilmington (UNCW).

In the Educational Leadership department, Parker teaches inquiry courses. Also, she teaches for the college teaching certificate and the coaching and mentoring certificate programs. At the University, she serves on University-wide Task Forces in educational development.

Currently, she leads faculty development initiatives transnationally. In 2020, Michele received the UNCW Chancellor's Teaching Excellence and the Graduate Faculty Mentor Awards. She authors publications on pedagogy, mentoring, and educational development.
 

Organised by: Catherine Lido

For further information: [email protected]