Restorative Justice Week 2009

Events

National Restorative Justice Symposium
"Communities Responding to Human Need"
and National Ron Wiebe Award Ceremony

School Responding to Human Needs with Restorative Justice

Dorothy Vaandering, Ph.D.
Memorial University

2009 National Restorative Justice Symposium
Nov. 18-20, 2009
St. John’s, NL

Welcome:

So how is that schools have become involved with RJ?
In the symposium thus far, much of our focus has been about harm done, about crime and about responses to crime.

BUT

Schools are not jails? Schools are not about crime? In fact though harm occurs there, the purpose for their existence is not about dealing with harm.

So what can RJ offer school communities … everything.

The RJ Education Path

• History
• Is it effective? How do we know?
• Moving the field forward
• A stronger theoretical foundation
• From rule-based to relationship-based schools
• Transforming school culture

My purpose today is to layout the path RJ has taken thus far in the field of education in terms of its history, its effectiveness, what my research has uncovered to bring the field forward, and then how does this all relate to the educational climate in NL today. As I share these things with you I will intersperse them with a few activities to get you thinking.

Iceberg activity:

Before I begin with these details however, I want to show you a video of RJ in action in a school setting. I would be happy to field questions throughout, but hope to leave the bulk of those to the end. As many of your questions will probably be answered throughout.

RJ in Education: History

• New Zealand
• Australia & Pennsylvania—RealJustice
• Europe
• Canada—British Columbia; Nova Scotia; Ontario

Schools became involved with RJ through the judicial system. As you all have probably heard, RJ has its roots in ancient indigenous and spiritual traditions. And it has been revived over the past 30-40 years.
In regards to schools, in New Zealand the imbalance of Maori youth with the judicial system caused officials to look into how Maori traditionally had dealt with youth crime. They discovered that crime was understood as a community problem and a unique circle process was used to acknowledge this. The judicial system then borrowed from this approach and began to employ some of the early western approaches to RJ. Because many of the incidents involved school and school property, school personel often were part of these circles.

Terry O’Connell, a police officer in Australia was involved in this police response to youth crime and began to work more intensely with schools in regards to dealing with crime and harm in the school context.

Ted Wachtel in Pennsylvania—school for youth who in trouble with the law and were not part of the regular school system. In 1990’s they met with O’Connell and together they developed the RealJustice brand of restorative justice. AS the Wachtel’s worked with their students, they began to realize that the principles and philosophy they were using with their youth were about schooling and relationships in general not just about those involved in crime. And a pilot project was begun in nearby middle schools to address incidents that ordinarily would lead to suspensions and expulsions. Projects in the US and Australia grew up side by side and gradually other locations in Europe and Canada began to engage with it. Some engaging specifically with the Wachtel’s, others engaging with other RJ practitioners such as David Moore in Australia and Kay Pranis,

In Canada which was a leader in RJ in the judicial field with victim offender mediation (Mark Yantzi) and engaging with aboriginal approache to justice through Rupert Ross, BC and Nova Scotia began to engage with RJ at a school level intermittently as well. Then in 2005, Ontario began to engage with RJ in a big way … There are pockets of RJ in schools world wide and some rumblings now in terms of whole school districts and jurisdications interested in adopting RJ.

• Adversarial approach: the more you punish the less likely they will do it again;
• Restorative approach: the stronger the relationship the less likely we will act inappropriately towards each other (IIRP, 2000)

All of these approaches are set up on the premise of moving from an adversarial approach … to a restorative approach …
Moving from rule-based to relationship-base cultures.

A Continuum of Practice

What happened?
What were you thinking/feeling?
How has this impacted you?
Who else has been impacted?
What’s been the hardest thing for you?
What do you need to go forward?

McCold and Wachtel, Safersaner Schools

To build relationship, most schools engage with a continuum of practice that was established that would see educators working WITH students as opposed to doing things TO or FOR students. The focus is on communication.

Key questions were established to guide these conversations with students that included the general RJ conference questions:

What happened?
What were you thinking/feeling?
How has this impacted you?
What’s been the hardest thing for you?
What do you need to go forward?

Affective statements included teachers relating to students how their behaviour is affecting them as a teacher; affective questions …. ; impromptu conference

Formal conference involves a serious incident that has affected a broad range of people such as the incident in Toronto where in November a firefighter who had been called to a highschool for a third time in one day on a false alarm was beaten up by a group of students was hospitalized for a week after being called to a school for the 5th time in one day. Several months later, the students and the fire department were running a community car wash and bbq to celebrate their relationship.

[Last October a highschool in Kitchener was locked down for hours after several students entered the building with weapons. The lockdown resulted in significant trauma for the school community and the students were arrested and expelled as a result of the incident. Half a year later, 30 participants sat together to hear the students stories and tell their own. The evening ended in tears, apologies and hugs from all sides.]

Each brings in the concept that a broader community is involved. [A picture I often use to identify the difference between RJ and other safe schools approaches is a 3-legged stool.]

In these responses, Ultimately RJ is a reaction to behaviour. At this point however, with these types of experiences, Wachtel identified that there was something more at its core … a way of being with each other that allowed for deeper relationships amongst school participants.

Morrison’s Triangle (2007)

Slowly RJ became associated with moving from rule-based school environments to relationship-based environments—and words such as paradigm shift and culture change became more common as pilot projects in Europe, Australia, USA, Canada proved to be successful and seemed to give educators a different way of dealing with troubling issues.
In essence, RJ was entering into the school system through a desire to create safer schools as well as to find ways to address aggressive/violent behaviour.
Schools that were engaging with RJ however, began to realize like Wachtel, it was about much more than behaviour … it was about how we listened to each other, how we as teachers talked with students/how students talked with each other.

And programs began to develop that targeted students who had minor issues with each other and then, some curriculum was developed to help encourage relationships and conflict resolution.

This early work with RJ however, continued to be a reactive response to student behaviour.

Is RJ Effective in a School Setting?

• Lansing, Michigan: 15% decrease in suspensions [1500 days less than previous years]
• Pennsylvania: disciplinary referrals dropped from 1,752 to 1,154; suspensions decreased from 105 to 65; detentions dropped from 844 to 332; and incidents of disruptive behavior decreased from 273 to 153.
• Waterloo, Ontario: suspensions dropped 80 % in elementary; 65% in secondary; expulsions dropped by 30%

At this level is it effective? There have been several significant studies that have been done, though not nearly as many as in the judicial system. Many of the studies focus on the numbers of suspensions/expulsions/office referrals and classroom disruptions. Looking at the statistics of some of these studies, I’ll let you decide if RJ is effective?

There are testimonials that repeatedly laud the benefits of RJ for schools. Thus quantitatively and anecdotally it appears RJ is very effective and schools in different geographical locations are latching on. Most recently in Canada, Ontario has become a hotbed for RJ in education with several school districts adopted RJ and training all of its staff.

• “theoretical and evidence-based research is falling behind practice. (Braithwaite, 2006)
• Empirical evidence is needed to move rj from the margins to the mainstream of institutional life. (Morrison & Ahmed, 2006; Sherman & Strang, 2007)

However, key leaders in the field have indicated clearly that in spite of the research that indicates RJ is effective, theoretical and evidence based research is falling behind practice and more needs to be known to understand theoretically why RJ is affective. And so I set out to see if I could contribute to the field with a qualitative, narrative case study using critical theory for a framework.

Effective Initiatives

• the policies are NOT rooted in the same power relationships underlying the punitive approaches the new ones are seeking to replace (Morrison, 2005, p. 100);
• their emphasis is NOT on the individual but rather on the relationship between those experiencing conflict, or the system of which they are a part (Jones, 2004; Lindstrom, 2007; Morrison, 2005); and
• the strategies for their development, implementation, or sustainability are strong (Crosse, Burr, Cantor, Hagen, & Hantman, 2002; Rigby, 2004).

I am passionate about RJ and was eager to illustrate what RJ looks like, sounds like and feels like on the ground. I wanted to find out what was it about RJ that made it different, and I wanted to find out how to insure that implementation was effective and sustainability possible … not a fad.

About Safe School initiatives in general I discovered that effective initiatives were deemed to be successful when:
1.
2.
3.

From this list, I felt hopeful as theoretically it appeared that RJ was more effective because it was rooted in different power structures and it engaged with the individual in the context of their community/institution. Implementation strategies also held hope I felt because I was hearing that whole school boards were committing to it.

I set out to examine RJ in 2 different schools in 2 different school districts. Each district was committed, each school completely sold on the concept and had everyone or significant participants trained. In my research I wanted to hear educator voices, people on the ground, not just administrators or district managers numbers and comments. I interviewed approximately 30 educators about their training and current use, then I followed 4 teachers and 2 principals for a 6 week period. I am deeply indebted to these people for providing a clearer picture of what is going on. What did I discover? Listen to 3 of the voices that are representative of many of the others:

Tricia – a Distorted View of RJ

• Teachers please monitor students going to the washrooms … Just now, it has been found that in the boys bathroom someone has wadded up wet toilet paper and tossed it on the ceiling. This affects poor Mr. Scylly and is truly just not right. To what effect this person did this, I have no idea. So please be more diligent in monitoring this.’ (B-DSB FN, p. 42)
• I am pleased to announce that we have caught the culprit and he is sitting in the office with me right now. Justice will be served. (B-DSB FN, p. 43)

Tricia’s experience highlights the limitations of one-off trainings in terms of understanding the comprehensive quality of RJ. Tricia has been an administrator for 5 years at WPPS. Her polite, gentle manners speaks of efficiency and order. She is passionate about RJ and convinced of its significance for creating safe and caring schools. She was one of the first administrators trained and their school held the board’s first RJ conference to deal with a serious bullying situation that involved a “kill list.” She believes that the school culture has changed significantly over the last 3-4 years since implementing RJ. Though I realize that we all struggle with living out what we espouse to be our philosophy consistently, a critical incident occurred that revealed how in spite of her commitment to RJ, her actions illustrate that it is possible to adopt RJ as simply another way of managing and controlling students.

Quotes …

In my field notes I respond with the following

What in the world!!!! The first announcement … ok but something about surveillance could be problematized. The second is clearly not restorative in any way, shape, or form … a full out announcement about being a culprit. Have I found the pulse of the school … fear that stepping out of line will result in a public announcement? Fear that stepping out of line will result in being shamed?

What is Tricia thinking? She is so passionate about restorative practice but she is able to do this to a Grade 4 student. Where is the gap? (B-DSB FN, p. 42)

When I ask her about it later in the day she is clear that it was appropriate to explain to them what they had done and why it was a problem and that a consequence with no warning or student input was appropriate because the kids know that –it’s not helping the school, it’s not helping the custodian, it’s damaging things, it’s serious, its vandalism.

In this Tricia contradicts significantly the restorative response she passionately advocates for and engages in adversarial, retributive justice. Ultimately she is completely focussed on rules not relationship as rules are identified as broken, a culprit is identified as responsible and consequences are the only adequate response. This is not the only instance where Tricia reveals a limited understanding of the RJ and these types of contradictions are frequent with teachers as well. 17:00

My point in this example is that when RJ is limited to issues of management and discipline, it inadvertantly gets redirected to focusing on rules, blame and punishment. In order to redirect this distorted perception, relationship must be highlighted and concepts that currently provide frameworks for RJ with their emphasis on discipline and behaviour must be reconsidered.

Patty – Engaging Reactively

• When I came back [from training] I asked some of the teachers that had been trained previously, what they thought about it because I just thought it was great and most of them thought it was great but a little, ya so what. We do that anyway. … Whereas to me, it was new and being new to the school and last year being a first year, brand new teacher…like I just had so many other things to worry about.

Meet Patty who teaches grade 5 at Blue Jay public school in another school board. She is in her mid thirties in her second year of teaching, Patty came back from training all excited and said she understood RJ as something “opposite from the way our whole system works”

Listen to the impact her colleagues have ….

To Patty this message was confusing. Her enthusiasm dampened perhaps because:

She feared that her excitement could indicate to others that she was not operating within the norm;

Or because she saw herself as an effective teacher, she too must be using RJ practices and thus continued as she had been.

Regardless her engagement is reduced to a strategy used only with students if they cause another harm. This is revealed in her no-nonsense approach where she repeatedly reprimands students brusquely, serves them time outs, sends them to the office. When I ask her if RJ has anything to do with situations like this she states:

• It doesn’t. That’s when you need to be firm with the kid and say, “What you’ve done is unacceptable. I don’t want to talk about it. You know yourself that it is ridiculous”.

No one’s been hurt by this behaviour…To me its just something that you use … as a strategy for bigger problems. This is between the boy and me and I want him to stop behaving like a fool and he knows it.

Here Patty reveals plainly several beliefs she holds about RJ which clearly contradict the principles of RJ including the liberty she feels she can take for berating the student as a person. For Patty RJ is severely limited to a reaction to specific behaviours and individuals; relationship is not considered. She is blind to recognizing the role and impact of the institution and in particular, her practice, on the students.

Her reactive occasional engagement with RJ allows for classroom practice that contradicts the foundational premise of RJ and leads to a further reinforcement of punitive managerial school structures. This becomes particularly unsettling because Patty mistakenly thinks she is practicing RJ and believes herself to be supportive of RJ.

Jim – Limited Training

• …confronting what you’ve done wrong or trying to fix it as best as possible so rather than being punitive, saying you’ve done this, this is the rules, this is the consequences, [rj says] it’s okay, you’ve done this, you’ve done this wrong and … having the opportunity to confront what you’ve done and who you’ve hurt, and [also] if you’ve been hurt.

Jim’s story makes clear training is limited.

Gr. 7-home room—l.a. social studies

Second career—loves teaching—not the marking

• Follower, insecure, like order, “hit over the head” in order to change
• 5 years ago … RJ is a bunch of crap…overtime by his own admission, his right wing perspectives have moderated somewhat and he can see its benefits.
• For Jim, RJ in education is comprised of …
• RJ addresses hurt not rules, but looking more closely he limits it to behaviour by focusing on the one causing harm…needs of one hurt are an after thought
• His role or the role of others as well as the role of the institution, is not considered … individual is decontextualized
• This come from his personality, but also from training which spent the bulk of the time on training teachers to be facilitators
• Thus the message he received is that RJ is about addressing behaviour
• Not building community or relationships.
• The training was good for big problems but help me here (he stomps his foot) in the classroom!

Jim is left feeling that …

What is Happening? Is RJ Sustainable?

• Tricia: the policies ARE still rooted in the same power relationships underlying the past punitive approaches;
• Patty: emphasis IS on the individual and not on the relationship between those experiencing conflict, or the system of which they are a part;
• Jim: strategies for RJ development, implementation, and sustainability are weak.

What’s happening in these 3 brief examples? According to the research, it appeared it was still about power, and about the individual. And Ruth Morris’ warning that RJ was being co-opted seemed very real. Training seemed inadequate for introducing RJ to educators in a way that they understood the essence of the RJ philosophy.

• By accepting the myth that problems in the world begin with the offender, by ignoring structural injustice, by attempting to restore the past, restorative justice is vulnerable for co-optation. (summarized from Morris in S. Moore, 2003, p. 34-35).

Ultimately, justice advocate Ruth Morris’ comment is very relevant for schools as well as penal systems:

What would be a more effective RJ approach in education?

• Critical theory:
  • How has RJ come to be?
  • Whose interests are being served?
  • Where do our frames of reference come from?
• John Paul Lederach
  • look past the episode to the epicentre of the issue.

Critical theory with its questions about who was benefiting from the initiative provides insight. Lederach’s position on conflict transformation to look beyond the incident to the epicentre also helped. As I looked deeper, past the incidents and past the students directly involved in the incidents, I considered the structure of the institution and the role of policy.

• OSSA 2000/ Bill 212, 2008
•  A. To ensure that all members of the school community, especially people in positions of authority, are treated with respect and dignity; (OSSA 2000/Bill 212 sections 301.1)

To give you an example of the kinds of things that became apparent, I’ll share OSSA 2000.

This was disheartening on the one hand. On the other hand, it made clear that schools have a tendency to fulfill adultist attitudes. When I spoke with teachers and administrators, when I read school policies, school codes of conduct, when I read much of the literature about RJ in schools, and watched videos about success stories, I was haunted by the term ‘classroom management’ and ‘classroom control’ as if it was the purpose of schools to ‘manage’ and control’ students as if they were objects, a cog in the wheel of a system. These terms seemed as prevalent in the RJ literature as they were in other safe schools literature.

Yet, I kept reflecting on the fact that what I knew of the essence of RJ held the key to the difference between RJ and other safe schools initiatives and it was this heart of RJ that I felt needed to be explored more fully.

Different Questions

Adversarial	Restorative
What rules have been broken?	Who has been hurt?
Who did it?	What are their needs?
What do they deserve?	What needs to be done for the harm to be repaired?
BLAMING	RELATIONAL

I came back to looking at the shift in paradigms in RJ as laid out by Howard Zehr, pioneer in the field, shifting from blame to relationship as is made clear by these questions that have become a hallmark for RJ. It brought back into view the need to consider 2 things … harm and justice

What is Harm?

What is it to be human?

• Vocation of becoming more fully human (p. 44)
• Affirmation of persons as subjects not objects (p. 44)
• “The encounter of women and men in the world in order to transform the world” (p. 129)
• “to impede communication is to reduce people to the status of ‘things’” (p. 128)

What is harm requires that we consider what it means to be human? We cannot understand harm unless we acknowledge a common understanding that humanity has value, has worth. Drawing on the insights of educator Paulo Freire who years ago already advocated for a move away from a banking model of education (which dehumanized people) to a pedagogy of freedom and problem posing, he defines education as a humanizing process, a process that moves people from being viewed as objects to subjects, a move that would see education nurturing all people to become more fully human (quote). WE are tempted ot say, ‘of course” but look again at the OSSA 2000 … some people (adults) are seen to be more fully human, or of more worth than students. Think of Patty or Tricia’s comments that allowed for them to diminish the worth of their students even when they had every intention of caring and honouring. The struggles in life come out of different people dominating others. So in focusing on harm done, RJ requires that humanity be valued Without that, what would harm be, there would be no need to give people space to tell their stories.

Harm, is not allowing people to be fully human, being able to live out their vocation of becoming more fully human.

If these questions can be answered then the next question …

What is Justice?

Has a context within which it can be understood and applied.

To help answer this question, I draw on Howard Zehr who aptly puts forth the image of changing lenses and the need for a paradigm shift? What is a paradigm shift? A totally different way of seeing the world?/p>

The paradigm shift Zehr advocates is found in the term justice itself— Shifting from understanding justice as fairness, but justice as shalom or tsedka. What’s the difference?

Changing Lenses

Lenses that measure…

Justice as fairness, which our western societies are predominantly dependent on thanks to John Rawls, requires a measurement of others and self to seek a balance and has a tendency for us to focus on ourselves as individuals to see how we measure up with others—its about righteousness—right and wrong—it’s about rights.

Lenses that honour…

Zehr proposes that justice be understood differently--Justice as shalom, is about–putting in the forefront of our attention the worth of the other and directs our attention outward to the needs of others—its about honouring humanity regardless of who a person is or what they do—its about responsibility and living in community.

RJ is about changing lenses …about asking ourselves at every turn we take “what message am I sending, am I measuring or honouring?” Adefintion of RJ with this firmly established would help guide its use in schools

RJ Acknowledges:

• Justice as honouring the inherent worth of all
• And being enacted through relationship.
•  When something occurs that undermines the well-being of some, a space is provided for dialogue whereby the dignity of all involved and affected can be restored
• So that each can once again become a fully contributing member of the community of which they are a part. (Vaandering, 2009)

What does this mean for education? (OCSTA slides—Iceberg activity)

What is Restorative Justice?

It is not:

• A school discipline policy
• A way to control student behaviour
• A student code of conduct
• A packaged program

It is a philosophy that:

• Honours the worth of all regardless of who they are or what they do;
• Recognizes the importance of community in individual lives;
• Believes healing of relationships is possible.

Restorative justice seeks to replace punitive, managerial structures with those that emphasize the building and repairing of relationships.
Bickmore 2002; Hopkins 2004

How do we do this?

We need to change the lenses through which we view people

Moving From…

What does this mean for school communities interested in employing RJ in effective and sustainable ways?

What does this mean for NL schools?

I have only just begun examining how RJ has been engaged with in schools … there is some awareness and some mention of it in anti-bullying materials. But Nl schools have the benefit of of being able to apply everything other schools have learned.

Sure, we can begin by engaging with it as a specific response to harm done if that is our challenge, but if we keep it as a strategy, we will miss the gift it can really be to our school communities.

We need to identify how we are currently dealing with harm done in our schools.

Assess what this tells us about our view of humanity.

Ask ourselves if we are truly interested giving everyone the opportunity to become more fully human and changing our lenses

So that we work to honour the worth of all, and not measure them.

What Message am I Sending?

Am I measuring?
Am I honouring?

• In the way we are interacting with other adults?
• In the policies that guide our schools?
• In our pedagogy?
• In our curriculum choices?
• In our interactions with students and parents?
• In the way we are helping students and adults repair harm that occurs?

Changing lenses challenges us to look at the messages we are sending in

• How We interact with each other as adults<
• In our policies;
• In pedagogy
• Curriculum choices
• How we interact with students
• How we are helping students and adults repair harm that occurs.

A Continuum of Practice

The continuum of practice must be expanded.

How Can School Employ RJ to Respond to Human Needs?

RJ starts with ME.

“making hope practical and despair unconvincing”
(Williams; Giroux)

How can schools respond to human need with RJ?

It may seem overwhelming as what we are engaged in is a social paradigm shift. Is it worth beginning.
Absolutely. Whole school cultures have changed as a result of teachers committing to no longer asking why but asking what happened.

There are many very practical ways, many places along the continuum where we can begin, as evidenced in the video. And if we are willing to keep looking deeper to the base of the iceberg, the base of the triangle, we can grow into an effective, sustainable understanding of RJ./p>

But ultimately it begins with a willingness to examine how we view humanity and harm and then making sure our lenses honour all of those around us. Ultimately, it requires realizing that RJ is not about fixing our youth, but about reflecting on our own perspectives.

RJ in education, starts with ME.

In this way we work to make hope practical and despair unconvincing.