Why We Need a Transformative Justice Teacher Education Now

• In Event: 63.044 - Levers to Prepare Teacher Candidates for Communities of Color: Dismantling Deficit Thinking and Racism

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose
This paper provides a conceptual framework for a Transformative Justice Teacher Education (TJTE) –teacher education that prepares K-12 preservice teachers to take pedagogical stances that cultivate purpose and belonging for all students. This study asks how restorative justice theory and Restorative Justice Discourses (RJDs) provide new and critical vocabularies that disrupt racism and racist ideas and help teachers be in relationship with students that reach beyond binaries. This framework, TJTE, represents a conceptual lever for supporting the uptake of asset-based pedagogies where relationships between teachers and students reveal assets otherwise rendered invisible.

Theoretical Frameworks
Building on a Restorative English Education—previously defined as a pedagogical stance “that not only seeks to restore classrooms and school into peacemaking and peacekeeping space” but also as “a movement to encourage youth to be civic actors and engage in a process that promotes a literocracy” (Author, 2013, p 133), TJTE is more expansive. A TJTE considers what it would mean for preservice teachers across disciplines to consider the question, “How do we teach in a way that people stop killing?” posed by Mary Rose O’Reilley (1984; 1993) in her reimagining of a peaceable classroom. This expansive framework also borrows from Kelley’s (2012) concept of a collective and expansive freedom where preservice teachers learn pedagogical stances that help them see the full humanity of the children they work with as well as their families and communities. This paper argues for implementing RJDs in teacher preparation programs where teachers learn to use language intentionally to disrupt racism and racist ideas that impede teaching and student learning.

Methods & Data
From 2012-2016, the author conducted a critical participant ethnography of one high school community seeking to cultivate a restorative justice culture as well as two non-profit organizations that provided technical assistance in restorative justice training and preparing for sustainability in schools and communities. As a participant observer, the author observed and engaged in restorative justice building community circle keeper training for staff and students; conducted in-depth interviews with key personnel involved in establishing restorative justice in the school community and students trained as restorative justice circle process facilitators. All interviews were recorded, transcribed and coded using first cycle and second cycle coding.

Results
The author found that educators adopted pedagogical stances that helped them shift from being punitive to thinking about how to be in relationship with students. Students trained in RJ in this high school community had nuanced understandings of justice and equity. Both stakeholders developed new vocabularies (coded as “old words/new ideas”) through training and practicing RJ that aided in creating boundary-crossing social networks.

Scholarly contribution
The author used the findings from this study to inform the creation of Restorative Justice Discourse (RJD) learning modules for preservice and in-service teachers committed to implementing restorative justice into their curriculum and using the pedagogical stances as a foundation for addressing educational inequities.

Author

• Maisha T. Winn, University of California - Davis