AN ENDARKENED AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACH TO PEER CO-CURRICULAR DIALOGUE FACILITATION TRAINING

This dissertation is a qualitative study drawing on endarkened feminist epistemology (Dillard, 2001), autoethnography (Jones, Adams,& Ellis, 2013), and Blackgirl autoethnography (Boylorn, 2016), each of which challenges the traditional roles between researchers and the researched, educators and students, and in the case of this study, dialogue facilitators in-training, and their dialogue facilitation educator. The purpose of this study was to capture the ways in which six Peer Dialogue Facilitators (PDFs) and myself, a Black woman and facilitation educator, perceive ourselves as facilitators of color and navigate facilitation obstacles amidst our new global pandemic reality. This study will utilize group interviews with the PDFs while simultaneously using critical auto-interviewing (Boufoy-Bastick, 2004) for myself, approximately one year after the conclusion of the peer dialogue facilitation training program. The group interview protocol incorporated an assemblage (Rodriguez, Shofer, Harter and Clark, 2017) of life notes or “narrative representations through letters, stories, journal entries, reflections, poetry, music, and other artful forms” (Dillard, 2001, p.664) developed by me and the PDFs during the facilitation training program to capture and respond to the collective wisdom developed by the PDFs and myself. This study will invite readers to reimagine the possibilities of dialogue facilitation training as a complex interdependent process in developing the facilitation skills of both facilitators in training and facilitator educators