Current Facilitator: Isabeau BD.
Current Facilitator: Isabeau BD.

✍️ Position Summary

This role consists of facilitating the College of Education (COE) Doctoral Program writing group, which meets biweekly throughout each quarter. This writing group was developed for doctoral students in the COE so that they may have a community with which to workshop their writing, share resources, hold each other accountable, and more. You can find more information about the COE and their programs here and on their blog.

Principle Duties & Responsibilities

Run group meetings to offer support to writers (70%)
  • Provide a space to discuss common challenges and strategies for doctoral program writing
  • Facilitate discussions that center around academic expectations, research design, genre conventions, writing challenges, the doctoral community, and so forth
  • Collaboratively set an agenda for each meeting based on writers’ needs
  • Help foster a constructive dialogue about writers’ work by asking questions and encouraging others to share feedback
  • Provide a space for writers to check in with each other and build rapport
Work together to locate and share resources that may be helpful for doctoral students as they work on dissertations, class assignments, research, and more (20%)
  • Assist participants in navigating the DePaul libraries, databases, and other research outlets
  • Provide and demonstrate relevant tools such as reverse-outlining, mind-mapping, and color-coding notes
  • Share other resources as necessary and help participants learn where to look for them
Perform other administrative and record-keeping duties (10%)
  • Communicate with the about group and facilitator needs
  • Run Zoom logistics and act as hosts for each meeting, using chat, breakout rooms, and other functions as necessary
  • Enter participants for each meeting into WCOnline
  • Keep track of new participants, taking down their emails and creating accounts for them in WCOnline when needed

💯 Position Benefits

  • Understand the vulnerability of sharing writing and seeking feedback in academic work, especially for writers who may be returning to academia after taking time off
  • Learn best practices for working with dissertation-level writers and managing large-group meetings
  • Understand and utilize a variety of strategies to effectively lead a team
  • Develop and execute practical event-planning and public-speaking skills

🏆 Position Qualifications

  • Interest in teaching or academic work preferred
  • Prior experience working with (and/or as) graduate students or research writing preferred

🗓️ Hours/Schedule

The time commitment for this role involves working 4 or 5 Saturdays in each quarter from 10 am-1 pm, which includes a one-half hour of pre-meeting prep and one-half hour of post-meeting wrap-up around the 10:30 am-12:30 pm meeting time. Additionally, there will be a time at the beginning of the quarter for new facilitator training (including Zoom logistics), time around mid-quarter for a facilitator check-in with the , and planning time during the week as needed. For Writing Center TutorWriting Center Tutors, the Saturday meeting time may be worked as extra hours or adjusted to be included in the tutors’ weekly hours.
We ask facilitators to commit to the role for one quarter with the opportunity to continue depending on the facilitators’ interest/availability and on the Writing Center’s needs.