Facilitators

We've talked some in class about how teachers in ICON are facilitators. What do they facilitate? How is what they are doing similar to writing center approaches to teaching writing?

Having worked in a writing center as an undergraduate I can say that tutors focus on heuristic questioning as a means to facilitate growth in a student's abilities as a writer. I would open a session asking the student what the assignment was. I would proceed to question their level of comfortability as a writer, their methods of composing, and how they felt about this particular assignment. Based on their response to these questions I had a template for the session. I then worked to synthesize their perceived concerns with my own informed opinion and guide the session accordingly. They gained a sense of ownership over their work and at that point I could proceed to gently lead them in the right direction, or swiftly draw their attention to a major error or confusing pattern within their writing.

TOPIC is far less personal than a tutoring session. It requires me to assign a grade, and the expectations are far different from a student's point of view. There is a similarity between a tutorial and a grading session in the writing concern option, which I believe should be mandatory for students. The fact that students have the option to simply submit a summary without telling me as an instructor how they feel about the process inhibits me from knowing essentially anything about the student. It makes the process of grading much more difficult, in that it requires me as grader to realize patterns from the text itself with no guidance. I do understand that students can take advantage of the writing center but many simply never do or ever will.

I think it necessary to say that while I do take into account student's own concerns, I hardly use them as the only method or even a very reliable method of grading or tutoring. A lot of students don't know what their writing problems truly are. They tell you they have problem with grammar because they have been told so their entire lives. I usually found that when a student told me they worried about grammar they had much more severe problems in other areas. So while grammar might be an overarching issue to them, I might disregard that and instead focus on their complete lack of thesis or say, on transitions and organization.

Within TOPIC I feel I must facilitate student's growth through commentary, commentary that is an entirely different, and largely impersonal version of a tutorial. The more experienced I become with TOPIC the more I realize that I am not just the student's tutor or grader, but simultaneously a weaker version of both.