A Toolkit for the Authentic Implementation of Restorative Justice

• In Event: 2021 Education Research Service Project Invited Poster Session

Abstract

Most American schools—particularly predominately Black ones—use exclusionary practices to address student behavior. These highly punitive and exclusionary practices have lifelong impacts on students. An alternative to this punitive philosophy—restorative justice—has come to American schools in recent decades. While restorative justice has tremendous potential, it is already being coopted to reinforce schools’ dominant punitive philosophies and/or is implemented without proper training. Man of Valor, Inc., the non-profit agency that runs two of the restorative justice-spaces at University City High School (UCHS) in St. Louis, Missouri, is interested in how to authentically implement restorative justice. This service project strives to augment the productive ways that Man of Valor facilitators and students use restorative justice, as well as to eliminate the unproductive ways that facilitators and students distort restorative justice. The data collected would take four central forms: field notes, interviews, student-researcher focus groups, and video data. These qualitative methods are ideal for the study of cultural processes and organizational change. The collaboration will lead to a tool kit, including a training manual of restorative interactional practices and video examples, that can be used for training new facilitators, future funding searches, and logic model expansions for Man of Valor.

Author

• Olivia Marcucci, Johns Hopkins University