During their tenure with WinC, student facilitators develop unique competencies that prepare them to lead and manage groups across all professional fields. What we know from our alumni from the past 20 years is that the practicum experience at the core of their training opens doors in professions as varied as Science, Medicine, Social Policy, Business Management, Marketing, Social Work, Law, and Education.
As a training center for facilitators,
our courses focus on developing the mindset and communication skills needed to manage a contentious human environment. Because students can only learn to facilitate by actually doing so, they dedicate many hours to a practicum experience where they host local and global dialogues for WinC.
We currently offer the following undergraduate courses:
Foundations of Facilitation
SOC 369 Foundational Theory and Practice in Small Group Facilitation is a 4-credit course. We offer four sections each semester. In addition to attending classroom workshops, student facilitators complete forty hours of practicum each semester—facilitating an average of two dialogues in any given week.
The participants for these dialogues come to us from international universities and organizations with whom we collaborate, as well as one of our partnering courses at Penn State: SOC 119N Race, Culture, and Ethnicity.
Foundations facilitators learn all the ways facilitated dialogue is different from the conversations they have with friends, family, and classmates. And they learn how facilitators are crucial to that process.
Advanced Facilitation
SOC 469 Advanced Theory and Practice in Small Group Facilitation is a 3-credit course. It accompanies LA 496, a 3-credit practicum. We now offer three sections of this course each semester. Students in this class must complete forty-eight hours of practicum during each of their second and third semesters with the center—facilitating an average of three dialogues in any given week.
The participants for these dialogues come to us from more than 200 courses across Penn State’s University Park campus. Our advanced team also facilitates dialogues for our "tailored programs" (i.e., sessions that are designed in response to a specific request).
Advanced facilitators come to see that they cannot learn to constructively facilitate a dialogue without studying sociology, nor can they do so without studying communication. That is what makes their experience truly “applied sociology”—because sociological concepts practically intersect with and shape the communication technologies they learn to deploy.