Cultivating Community Conversations: Utilizing Peer Facilitation Groups on Your Campus

The profession of student affairs is constantly thinking of ways that we can be innovative in how we encourage students to think about the world around them critically, and synthesizing what they learn in the classroom into application. Peer facilitation groups such as, Diversity Educators (DE)/Diversity Peer Educators (DPE), provide students with this understanding through interactive facilitations, presentations, and workshops. DPE/DE’s are able to do this in an applicable way and provide a certain level of comfort in facilitating these workshops with their peers. 

This briefing will provide two examples from programs at the University of Missouri and the University of Tennessee where peer facilitators are used to “plant seeds of thought” and facilitate challenging conversations. Both DPE (University of Missouri) and DE (University of Tennessee) will provide program formats and variations, challenges, and continued opportunities they have observed for growth and enhancement.

Although there are other peer-facilitator groups within higher education, the unique and new quality that DPE has to offer is that levels of education have been created to its content. From awareness to skill-based application, and action; both DPE & DE have grown and we are eager to provide information about these innovative programs to others.

Learning Outcomes

By participating in this session, attendees will:

• understand the formula that makes a program such as the Diversity Peer Educators work and what has made it sustainable;
• learn to develop ways that individuals in their own institutions could create space or opportunity for a program such as DPE; and
• learn to apply DPE or a program such as DPE in your own campus by being provided the “training” process as well as manual with resources.