Struggling Toward Humanization: Restorative Justice, Deeper Learning, and the Pursuit of Transformed Relationships at an Urban Charter School

• In Event: 54.018 - Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

In recent years, in response to data demonstrating that youth of color tend to experience disproportionate rates of detention and suspension, a growing number of American public schools have begun to replace zero tolerance policies with more equitable approaches to discipline and culture (Fronius, Persson, Guckenburg, Hurley, & Petrosino, 2016). At the same time, many schools also have set their sights on “deeper” instructional goals—goals which go beyond foundational literacy and numeracy to involve critical thinking and creative problem-solving (Trilling & Fadel, 2012). In this dissertation project, I explore how a “No Excuses” urban charter school with emergent commitments to both of these new priorities is striving to enact them. More specifically, I draw on the traditions of ethnographic case study (Yin, 2013) and narrative portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) in order to explore the efforts of the school’s leadership team to transform the teaching, learning, and broader culture of their institution in light of its new vision—a vision which marries the goal of reorganizing school culture around the deliberative practices associated with restorative justice (Wadhwa, 2016) with the goal of reorganizing classroom instruction around the student-centered practices associated with deeper learning (Mehta & Fine, 2015). Taking a phenomenological approach, I focus on the experiences and sense-making of these leaders as they strive to apply this twofold vision to their work with each other, with teachers, and with students. The territory which this study traverses, I assert, is largely pathless; the scholarly and practice literatures have very little to say about how cultural work and instructional work intersect in schools, with particularly little which addresses the implications of the restorative justice (RJ) framework for the domains of leadership and instructional practice (Morrison & Vaandering, 2012). It is also territory which is in great need of illumination. This holds true on multiple levels. In a literal sense, the field will benefit from having a set of thickly-described narrative cases which can help educators to “see,” and thus to anticipate, the affordances and dilemmas involved in undertaking transformation in the direction of restorative justice and/or deeper learning. Beyond this, the rapid rate at which schools are committing to such transformations means that “clearly articulated theory is becoming necessary for [RJ in education] practices to be effective and sustainable” (Evans & Vaandering, 2016, p. xii). There is thus a need for work which extends theoretical perspectives on the synergies and disjunctions between the RJ framework and other in-use educational frameworks—including those associated with the pursuit of “deeper” teaching and learning.
The study’s findings can be organized into two strands. The first of these concerns what some theorists have called symmetry, e.g. broad forms of coherence and alignment when it comes to the experiences of adults and students within schools (Mehta & Fine, In Press; Roberts, 2012). To wit, leaders at the research site generally accepted the idea that “RJ [must be] understood to have implications for all facets and fields of education including how adults relate to each other” (Vaandering, 2010, p. 170). This commitment to symmetry was especially evident as leaders worked together to redesign the school’s model of teacher evaluation and support;
throughout this process, they talked frequently about their desire to “lead restoratively.” While this desire helped leaders to heal and strengthen their interpersonal relationships, it also gave rise to three persistent dilemmas: the puzzle of how to move the work forward while meeting a wide range of individual needs; the tension between the imperative for efficiency and the desire to make decisions in deliberative, transparent, and non-patriarchal ways; and the question of how to reimagine accountability from a non-punitive standpoint while at the same time elevating expectations. These dilemmas, I argue, are ones which are central to the RJ framework, but they are not ones which the literature on RJ in schools has emphasized in relation to the work of leadership. As such, they shed light on the more general challenges associated with the transition from authoritarian to restorative frameworks, suggesting that such transitions require much more significant shifts in practice and in perspective than schools and/or districts might anticipate.
A second strand of findings is concerned with what sociologists might call boundary work (Lamont & Molnar, 2002), in particular the boundaries—and regions of overlap—between school culture and classroom instruction. In this case, the question was how, if at all, leaders at the research site thought about the implications of the RJ framework for curriculum and instruction. Drawing on both interview and participant-observation data, I posit that leaders’ understandings fell along a continuum with respect to complexity and nuance. A few leaders viewed restorative work as loosely or instrumentally related to instructional practices; culture-building circles and re-integrative discipline practices, in their view, help to ensure that students are able to master academic content. For a majority of leaders, restorative work and instructional work were understood as being a) instruction which treats teacher-student and student-student relationships as a foundation for efficacy and b) instruction which pairs high expectations with high support (McCold & Wachtel, 2003). This view, while it affirmed the importance of integrating culture-building activities into the classroom, did not necessarily imply a dramatic shift from the skill-based, test-focused, micromanagement-heavy vision of instructional practice which previously dominated the school. A few leaders, however, articulated epistemological linkages between RJ and the tradition of critical pedagogy, imagining that the relationship between the students and the curriculum needs to be treated as space for restoration and/or transformation—and thus suggesting that instruction consistent with RJ would need to look fundamentally different from the skill-and-drill model that came before. It was this linkage which was most robustly borne out through classroom observations, and which is echoed in the existing literature about restorative pedagogy (Toews, 2013; Vaandering, 2013; Winn, 2013).
Stepping back, this study suggests that it is necessary but not sufficient for educators merely to acknowledge the abstract notion that the RJ framework has implications for instruction; rather, they collectively need to unpack the specific nature of these implications, and, as part of this work, to explore the ways in which choices about curriculum and pedagogy impact the nature of relationships, culture, and power dynamics in the classroom. Relatedly, resources which are designed to support the implementation of RJ in schools should more explicitly address the framework’s curricular and pedagogical implications, as well as the ways in which restorative philosophy can—and should—shift leadership practices. More generally, the study suggests that successfully transforming schools from authoritarian into humanizing institutions will require educators to conceptualize culture and instruction as interrelated domains—an argument which challenges some of the dominant perspectives and structures in the field.

Author

• Sarah Melanie Fine, Harvard University