Blog #1

After our conversation in class yesterday, I'm feeling pretty excited about my first conversation circle next week. I'm looking forward to getting to know some really cool people, and I'm excited to develop more conversation facilitation skills. I also think it's just going to be a really great experience, and so I look forward to the weeks ahead where my group really starts to fall into a rhythm. I'm a bit nervous about the first few weeks as we're just getting to know each other, but I look forward to when we can have some fun and engaging conversations with each other. The challenge that this group may pose for me is also exciting, and so I hope to learn a lot from the other people in my group and from the experience of being a facilitator.

This is a little different than any facilitation I've done in the past, and in some ways I think that it will be a little bit easier because it's less formal. However, it might be more challenging because it's a conversation with my peers. I imagine that it will be difficult for me to find a balance between being a peer and being a facilitator. In the past I think I've found that I tend to gravitate toward a more hands-on role in conversation, but I hope to be able to remember that I'm not teaching, but I have the opportunity to be as much of a participant in the conversation as anyone else in the group. I'm looking forward to this, but again, I imagine it will be difficult for me to find this balance. However, after our conversation in class yesterday I think that I have a better sense of how I might be able to set this precedent early. I hope to just be able to tell the group that I'm there to facilitate but also to participate, and that we all have the opportunity to learn by really jumping in and engaging with the conversation. I hope that this will make it so that I have to ask fewer questions, that conversation will just flow, and that finding the balance will be easier because of it.

I find a lot of my motivation for being a conversation facilitator through my work at the Sweetland Peer Writing Center. I have experienced and witnessed the frustration that international students have felt at how difficult it is to really pick up English. In one conversation I had in the writing center, a student told me that it was hard for her because she was only friends with other international students and they rarely spoke English together, so the only time she was really getting any English was in class. A University class, she said, was not an ideal place to learn more English. I can empathize with what she's going through, and I really hope that for at least a few students these conversation circles are a space where they can feel comfortable to speak and practice English. I also hope that it's a space where students can meet new people who have undergone similar experiences, and that I can learn from them as they relate their experiences to me.