Restorative Pedagogy1
While playing “Out of the Box” with a group of high school students, a student joked that his team should just google the answer. “You never said we couldn’t google it!” he shouted. We laughed as a group about what results we might get from googling “How can Jordan who likes to draw cartoons and make silly videos repair the harm from stealing Alex’s-skateboard,” referencing the scenario we were using for the activity. After the joking and laughter died down, I asked, “What if we google ‘Colorado penalties for misdemeanor theft’?” The group agreed that Google would have a clear answer for that search. Next, I asked, “So if Google can give us answers for the conventional criminal justice system so easily, why isn’t Google helpful in restorative justice?” This started a fruitful conversation that surfaced some of the main points that differentiate restorative justice from the conventional justice system. The students talked about how restorative justice considers the circumstances of the individuals involved and takes into account the specific harms they have experienced. It is the collective brainpower of the people in the circle considering the individuals involved, their strengths, and the harms experienced that allows those factors to be synthesized into creative ideas to repair harm.
—Lindsey Pointer
This story speaks to why restorative practices need to be taught differently than other disciplines. Whereas in other disciplines, there may be one correct answer to a question, in a restorative approach, there will inevitably be many varied “correct” responses. This is because the individuals involved and their distinct experiences always inform the outcome. We must find ways of teaching that allow us to practice understanding the complicated worlds of individuals, the social structures and institutions that influence our lives, and the ways in which we are all connected. As restorative practices and the teaching of restorative practices spread around the world, scholars, practitioners, and educators have begun to ask these very important questions: How should restorative practices be taught? What teaching structures and methods are appropriate in forming a restorative pedagogy?
This chapter serves as an introduction to restorative pedagogy, a paradigm of teaching in alignment with restorative values and principles. It makes the case for the use of games and experiential activities as a central restorative teaching strategy. It further examines how teaching in a restorative way redistributes power and contributes to greater structural transformation through giving voice to those who have typically been marginalized in the classroom. In this way, experiential learning can function as a liberatory pedagogical practice, just as the restorative justice process can function as a liberatory practice for participants.
Teaching in Alignment with Restorative Values and Principles
In the traditional paradigm of teaching, often referred to as the “Transmission Model,” the teacher transfers knowledge to the students, generally through lectures.2 The instructor is normally situated at the front of the classroom, delivering knowledge to a group of students who take notes. Paulo Freire has referred to this method of teaching as the “banking” concept of education, “in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing and storing the deposits made by the teacher.”3 The teacher has absolute control as the authority figure, determining course content, objectives, and outcomes. This encourages a passive approach to learning on the part of students.
From the viewpoint of a restorative framework, there are a few problems with this education model. Whereas restorative approaches prioritize equal voice and emphasize the facilitation of a space where all voices are valued, the traditional classroom values and creates space for the teacher’s voice above all others, establishing a clear hierarchy. Additionally, the traditional classroom structure encourages a passive role for students, a conformist approach to learning, and sometimes an adversarial sense of competition resulting from the grading structure of the course. All of these qualities contradict the participatory, individualized, and collaborative nature of restorative processes. It is interesting to note that this approach to teaching shares many similarities with the dominant criminal justice system, in which a punishment is assigned to a passive offender within a court ritual marked by hierarchy and adversarial interactions.
Because of this contradiction, traditional instructor-centered teaching strategies are particularly unsuitable for restorative practices courses, regardless of context. Restorative practices classrooms or training spaces should instead seek to build and engage community, while modeling the values and principles central to the restorative justice process. As Belinda Hopkins notes, “The restorative mindset inevitably impacts on pedagogy. A restorative teacher who works with her students ensures that how she teaches simultaneously models her own restorative values but also develops restorative values, aptitudes and skills in her students.”4
So how might restorative pedagogy align with the restorative values and worldview? The restorative worldview sees humans as fundamentally relational beings, intricately connected to one another and to their environment.5 The values that emerge from this worldview include respect, accountability, participation, self-determination, nonviolence, humility, trust, and transformation. It is the mission of the restorative justice movement to transform individuals and social structures to be in alignment with this worldview and the core restorative values. This includes influencing the way in which restorative practices are taught. Restorative educators must ask themselves: What learning structure will communicate and reinforce the restorative values? How can we better value the perspectives of the students in the room in addition to the teacher’s? How can education encourage the development of empathy?
Critical and Feminist Pedagogies: Education as a Liberatory Practice
The emerging restorative pedagogy is in alignment with a new paradigm of teaching that has been gaining popularity in recent decades, in which students and teachers jointly construct knowledge, share power, and learn cooperatively in the classroom while promoting the development of relationships. The origin of this new paradigm is found, in part, in the writings of Paulo Freire and the development of critical pedagogy. Freire advocates for “liberating education,” which helps students to recognize and confront domination and take action to end oppression.6 In critical pedagogy, students and teachers engage in meaningful dialogue to learn from each other, ultimately promoting a more democratic and egalitarian society.
Dialogue between the students and teacher is a central component of critical pedagogy, which helps to challenge the hierarchy inherent in traditional teaching methods and to empower all parties in the learning process. As Freire explains, “Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with student-teachers.”7 Student and teacher are jointly responsible for participating in the learning process and continually growing through it.
Feminist pedagogy, a contemporary expression of critical pedagogy, broadens the focus to more intentionally include gender, race, sexuality, age, and nationality. bell hooks is an advocate for critical and feminist pedagogy who emphasizes the importance of building community in the classroom through taking time to really get to know students. In hooks’s classroom, everyone is recognized and valued as individuals, and as she explains, “This insistence cannot be simply stated. It has to be demonstrated through pedagogical practices.”8 In this way, the classroom becomes a democratic setting in which everyone feels a responsibility to contribute. Each student is an active participant, not a passive consumer. This engenders a respect for multiculturalism, because the value of each individual voice and experience is recognized.
This active engagement with vulnerability must pertain to the teacher as well. The teacher must be willing to share, grow, and be fully present alongside the students. This may prove difficult for some teachers because they fear losing control. However, it is necessary in order to create the desired climate of openness, trust, and shared risk-taking. Teachers who use circle practice with students are already experienced in releasing control and power in order to fully participate and trust in the process, though this is often the biggest challenge.
These insights from critical and feminist pedagogy align with restorative values and provide ample inspiration for the further development of restorative pedagogy. Through flattening the hierarchy of the classroom and giving voice to the thoughts and experiences of those who are often marginalized, the act of learning can contribute to greater structural transformation. When students’ voices are elevated, students and teachers learn from each other’s perspectives and build a shared understanding of structural issues along with a motivation to bring about change. Games and activities provide an effective vehicle for creating this equalizing, engaging, and dialogue-promoting learning environment.
Restorative Justice Education as a Liberatory Practice
Teaching restorative practices in a way that is grounded in the insights of critical and feminist pedagogies has the potential to expand the transformative impact of restorative justice. A prominent critique of restorative justice is that in its focus on making amends at an interpersonal level, it fails to address larger, structural injustices. As Dyck explains,
One of the most persistent critiques of the field of restorative justice as it is manifested in the practical activities of community programs around the world is that it still fundamentally fails to address structural dimensions of criminal conflict. Its critics argue that current restorative programming focuses too much energy on the interpersonal dimensions of crime and ignores the deeper roots of the trouble as found in class, race/ethnicity, and gender-based systemic conflict.9
This shortcoming is due in part to the fact that practitioners are generally not trained to think about restorative justice work within a systemic, structural frame of reference and therefore, by default, tend to focus solely on personal responsibility without understanding the structural roots of the conflict or wrongdoing. In order to remedy this, practitioners need to be trained not only in interpersonal communication skills, but also in the ability to recognize and address the way in which the actions of those who the public may perceive as “problem people” actually reflect larger systemic problems.
Dorothy Vaandering has similarly argued that common theoretical frameworks used in the restorative justice field such as Reintegrative Shaming Theory and the Social Discipline Window maintain a harmful focus on the “victim” and “offender” and what “occurs within their individual psyches while failing to take account of the institutional and structural forces at play in shaping the beliefs and actions of individuals.”10 The contributing context in which the harm occurred is often ignored. Vaandering asserts that critical theory ought to inform and strengthen restorative justice practice, allowing the process to move beyond a narrow focus on individual behavior. When these systemic, institutional, and structural dimensions are considered, the restorative justice conference itself can function as a liberatory practice for participants.
Just as a restorative justice conference that adequately considers the structural roots of an incident can function as a liberatory practice, so can learning about restorative justice through a mode of teaching grounded in restorative values. Barb Toews notes that restorative justice education can produce similar outcomes to a facilitated process, including the opportunity to speak about personal experiences, personal change and growth, and a desire to engage in positive relationships and give back to the community. As Toews explains,
This pedagogy, based on restorative values, aims to inspire individual and social transformation; build community among participants; give voice to the unique experiences of participants; offer opportunities for real-life problem solving; provide a creative learning environment that is co-created by students and facilitators; view students as practitioners, theorists, and educators; and invite instructors to view themselves as students and share in the learning process.11
In order for these greater transformative outcomes to be achieved, the learning process needs to create space for students to speak to their individual experiences and perspectives as they relate to course material and for those contributions to be honored by the group. Together, students and teacher grapple with what they have shared with each other and consider the meaning for their lives and for the world. This represents a crucial shift from an attempt to teach about social and structural issues in the abstract to a classroom that actively challenges these issues through building a shared lived understanding and a motivation to address the roots of crime and conflict.