Plenary 4

Professor Emerita, Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire - USA

Sheila McNamee, Ph.D. is Professor of Communication at the University of New Hampshire and co-founder and Vice President of the Taos Institute. She has held visiting professorships at the University of Parma, Italy; Utrecht University, Netherlands; University of Sao Paulo, Brazil; and City University of Hong Kong. Her work is focused on dialogic transformation within a variety of social and institutional contexts. She is author of several books and articles, including Research and Social Change: A Relational Constructionist Approach (with D.M. Hosking, Routledge, 2012), Relational Responsibility: Resources for Sustainable Dialogue (with K.J. Gergen, Sage, 1999), and co-editor of Education as Social Construction: Contributions to Theory, Research, and Practice, (with T. Dragonas, K. Gergen, & E. Tseliou, Taos WorldShare, 2015), and the Sage Handbook of Social Constructionist Practice (McNamee, M. Gergen, Camargo-Borges, & Rasera – Sage, 2020).

Professor McNamee actively engages constructionist practices in a variety of contexts to bring communities of participants with diametrically opposing viewpoints together to create livable futures. She lectures and consults regularly, both nationally and internationally for universities, private institutes, organizations, and communities.

Email: sheila.mcnamee@unh.edu
Web: www.taosinstitute.net/sheila-mcnamee

Mercy College, NY; International Trauma Studies Program, NYC; Houston Galveston Institute Faculty - USA

Dr. Saliha Bava is an Associate Professor of Marriage and Family Therapy at Mercy College, New York. She is a long-term Taos Associate & Advisory board member who has created a number of projects with Taos, including a popular video series on Relational Practices. Her focus on performative methodologies, dialogue as socially just and hyperlinked identities is part of academic activism where she questions the dominant discourses of research methodology, social justice, and identity. From a liberatory perspective of relational play she consults on trauma, cross-cultural relationships, teaching/learning, leadership, masculinity, inclusion/belonging, disaster response, and research. She is a co-founding member of the International Network of Collaborative-Dialogic Practices (Co-sponsored by Taos Institute & HGI). Her Relational Book for Parenting has been adapted for teacher training and she is currently working on The Relational Organization. She lives in NYC. Join her on Twitter @ThinkPlay.

Email: drbava@gmail.com
Web: http://salihabava.com

Department of Early Childhood Education, University of Athens - Greece

Thalia Dragonas is a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Athens. She was for several terms Head of the Department of Early Childhood Education, she was a member of the board of the Greek Open University and the Center of Educational Research. Her research activity lies in the area of identities and the articulation of the social with the psychological. She has participated in and directed many Greek and international projects and has worked extensively for the educational reform of the Muslim Minority in Western Thrace. Specific areas of research interests are: psychosocial identity and intergroup relations, intercultural education and ethnocentrism in the educational system, prevention and promotion of early psychosocial health, transition to parenthood, construction of fatherhood and masculinity as well as research methodological issues such as the relationship of qualitative and quantitative techniques.

Email: thaliadragona@gmail.com

Grupo Campos Eliseos - Mexico

Tamara was raised in the Jewish community of Mexico City where she learned to belong through formal and informal learning experiences. She started teaching her peers from a young age and never stopped. Tamara has studied in 6 different countries where she got a BA in educational sciences, an MA in Lifelong Learning: Policy and Management. Now, she is finishing her PhD research on Relational School Management. Currently, She is working as a consultant in education at a Jewish day school.

Email: tamrichlon@gmail.com

Coach, Trainer, Consultant; Happily Different - The Netherlands

Loek is the founder of www.appreciativechangeworks.nl, a coaching, training and consulting service using social constructionism as a foundation for co-creating change. Humanizing change processes is his core business. Using the appreciative stance builds bridges and strengthens change processes, leads to sustainability when constantly feeded by collaborative and dialogical practices. Loek is author of the Taos Institute WorldShare book Happily Different (Taos, 2014) which illustrates in detail how constructionist approaches lead to more hopeful and “happy” changes for all.

If one characteristic typifies Loek Schoenmakers, then it is the unifier. Like a thread in life and work - at home and abroad - Loek discovers time and again that a sustainable world, and sustainable change requires the re-humanization of change processes.The ideas of Social Constructionism are the foundation of Loek's work. Loek has built up many experiences in different roles such as a school teacher, school leader, school advisor, educational developer, coordinator , coach, trainer in many educational projects in the Netherlands as well as abroad in countries such as Belgium, Suriname, Aruba, Czech rep and Slowakia. Currently he works within several Master Degree programs of Education. Within the Teacher Training Institute Loek is asked to set up a new movement based on social construction and Research. In 2011 received the PhD degree in social science from Tilburg University.

Email: loekschoen@yahoo.com