Restorative Practices: An Antidote to Classroom Oppression

Traditional classroom practices prioritizing the teacher's authority over the students' needs significantly threaten their emotional and academic growth. These classrooms, devoid of student voice, choice, and autonomy, enforce a punitive and exclusionary approach to discipline. This approach, which values compliance and passivity over understanding the emotional and psychological complexities of misbehavior and conflict, disproportionately affects marginalized students, further straining their access to an equitable education.

Traditional approaches, with their lack of understanding of conflict resolution's emotional and psychological complexities, often lead to draconian punitive and exclusionary practices. These methods, which involve isolating offending children and leaving them to deal with their emotional turmoil alone, take a significant emotional toll. The wounds of the isolated student deepen, the community remains fractured, and unresolved tension permeates the air, creating a distressing environment for all involved.

Interpersonal conflict can only be healed communally, and restorative practices, inspired by Indigenous peacemaking circles and other customary cultural conflict resolution processes, offer hope. These practices include community circles, restorative conversations, and teacher mediation. They provide an alternative to traditional disciplinary methods and can work towards repairing the harm and division they cause.        

Restorative practices foster community, compassion, love, and understanding, empowering students to navigate and resolve conflict through discussion, deep listening, and collective learning. Teachers who embrace restorative practice must cultivate the critical self-awareness necessary to model and support the emotional intelligence and self-regulation promoted by restorative practices. My journey to embracing restorative practices to support students’ emotional and academic growth began with my innate desire to fight for justice. 

As a child, I was known for my purity of heart and ability to detect and be deeply affected by the injustices and harm we often overlook. This sensitivity grew into a teenage rebellion against the world's injustices, which extended to the tyranny of 'the man' from my suburban bedroom. It wasn’t until I found myself teaching during a historic pandemic that I truly understood the inequity crisis within the education system. The pandemic revealed how the system fails students who need the most support. Upon their return to in-person learning, I struggled to meet their widespread social-emotional and academic needs in an emotionally intelligent and compassionate way. Instead, I unwittingly enacted antiquated and injurious ways of dealing with the rampant behavioral dysregulation and stunted emotional development COVID left in its wake. Something within told me there must be a better way to respond to the vast emotional needs of my students than to single them out, remove them from class, and deny them the opportunity to articulate their hurt and repair harm.

The dissonance between what my heart felt was best for children and what I was doing became increasingly intolerable and emotionally unsustainable. I found spiritual resolution and philosophical and practical alignment through restorative practices. The redistribution and democratization of power from a top-down, teacher-dictated to a student-centered, co-created educational approach appealed to my justice-seeking soul, and I decided to implement restorative practices in my classroom. Dismantling a harmful classroom hierarchy required confronting and correcting my unconscious inclination and bias toward behaving and thinking in ways that uphold the oppressive structures that smother student autonomy and agency.

Only after my awakening could I begin helping students overcome their learned passivity and subjugation to become happily engaged agents of their education. Restructuring oneself, practice, and physical space to create the conditions for humanizing, liberating, and transformative learning is challenging, especially when students haven’t hitherto enjoyed spaces where their voices are valued and, therefore, struggle with this newfound independence. Denied opportunities to examine their identities, voice their perspectives, and work through conflict communally, these siloed students were initially reticent and reluctant to engage in the first routine I implemented, which can be considered the essential component of restorative practices: the community circle. Elegant in its simplicity, the community circle is where students routinely gather to have their individual voices heard in response to a question, prompt, or, most importantly, a conflict.

With a talking piece in their hand, signaling that they have the right to speak and for others to listen, students slowly reveal and reify themselves through our daily discussions. Exchanging ideas, opinions, and perspectives, students become increasingly comfortable speaking their truths and invest in building and maintaining connectivity and community. When students commit to ways of being that promote collective harmony, transgressions that create discord hold students accountable for their actions, and the community circle is the designated space where conflict is resolved through discussion and understanding.

Contrasted to the alienating punitive approach of traditional school discipline, the community circle deals with interpersonal conflict directly and inclusively by ensuring the right of the disputing parties to be heard and understood to reach a mutually satisfactory resolution or decision. The community circle encapsulates the heart of restorative practices; in the case above, it restored to students their voices and agency and provided them with a framework to build community and productively and humanely navigate conflict.

With a palpable sense of community secured in my classroom and the student’s investment in its health and maintenance, I no longer needed to exhaust myself by struggling to maintain order and dominance with punitive and exclusionary measures. Instead,  fed by a deepened understanding of my students through community circles,  I could focus on creating engaging and meaningful content.

The current research on schools adopting similar practices reflects the emotional growth, the discernibly positive shift in student attitudes toward each other and learning, and the sharp decline of egregious misbehavior that restorative practices brought to my classroom. Studies suggest that restorative practices implemented strategically and consistently, can enhance teacher-student relationships and reduce exclusionary disciplinary referrals for students of color, thereby working to close the racialized disciplinary gap and disrupt the cycle of classroom oppression (Gregory et al., 2016).

Furthermore, when teachers consciously replace their habitual deficit-thinking bias and reactive punitiveness with positive “culturally relevant critical teacher care,” they can contribute positively to their students of color’s sense of self-efficacy (Hamnacher et al., 2018). An uplifting and encouraging classroom culture that eschews deficit thinking, where students are seen, heard, and empowered to make their own decisions, engenders a sense of self that traditional approaches wholly neglect. Additionally, by creating a safe and emotionally responsive classroom, restorative practices can safeguard against the emotional abuse and neglect of punitive and exclusionary approaches and create a healing environment that counteracts existing trauma (Breedlove et al., 2021).

The success of restorative practices is predicated on the current system’s willingness to abandon its adversarial and punitive approaches to student discipline to accommodate a framework that responds to conflict resolution’s emotional and psychological complexities. Research suggests that restorative practices can be integrated into existing behavioral response plans. However, success depends on its systematic implementation and faithful and consistent enactment by teachers who have philosophically subscribed to its tenets of cultural and social-emotional responsivity (Vincent et al., 2021). 

A proposed and piloted “integrated system for restorative change” advances a conceptual model of restorative practices that has seen “statistically significant increases in student perceptions of school safety, school belonging, perceived inclusion in decision-making, and teacher’ belief in them as learners” (Huguley et al., 2022). The more restorative practices are legitimized through quantifiable data, the easier it will be to argue their merits and push for adoption by traditionally minded stakeholders that can influence systemic change, not least of which are the teachers who will bring it to the lives of their students. Without top-down, systemic training and implementation, it would be unreasonable to think that teachers would successfully initiate restorative practices themselves, let alone be interested in an approach antithetical to their sensibilities and conceptions of justice.

            With over 100,00 K-12 schools in the United States, the shift from punitive practices to restorative ones is necessarily gradual and requires departments of education to adopt and make mandatory restorative practices so that children, especially those of color, have access to a humanizing, identity-affirming, and uplifting education that creates emotionally resilient, critically thinking, and compassionate citizens.

My awakening to the necessity of restorative practices was borne of self-awareness, love, and a thirst for fairness. I will continue to water those seeds in my students so that they find themselves and use their voices to continue the cause of peace and justice. 

-Synthesis paper from CIED-5123-43730 Curriculum in the Secondary School

 Sources:

1. Gregory, Anne; Clawson, Kathleen; Davis, Alycia; Gerewitz, Jennifer. (2016). The Promise of Restorative Practices to Transform Teacher-Student Relationships and Achieve Equity in School Discipline. Journal of Educational & Psychological Consultation, 325 - 353

2. Hambacher, Elyse. Resisting Punitive School Discipline: Perspectives and Practices of Exemplary Urban Elementary Teachers. (2018). International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (QSE), 102 - 118

3. Breedlove, Meghan; Choi, Jihyeon; Zyromski, Brett. Mitigating the Effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences: How Restorative Practices in Schools Support Positive Childhood Experiences and Protective Factors. (2021). New Educator, Vol. 17, Issue 3, 223-241

4. Huguley, James P.; Fussell-Ware, Dashawna J.; McQueen, Shanté Stuart; Wang, Ming-Te; DeBellis, Bianca R. (2022). Completing the Circle: Linkages between Restorative Practices, Socio-Emotional Well-Being, and Racial Justice in Schools. Journal of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders, 138 - 153

5. Vincent, Claudia; Inglish, John; Girvan, Erik; Van Ryzin, Mark; Svanks, Rita; Springer, Shareen; Ivey, Allison. (2021).  Introducing restorative practices into high schools' multi-tiered systems of support: successes and challenges. Contemporary Justice Review, Vol. 24, Issue 4, 409 - 435