Student Agency in Restorative Justice: An Ethnographic Analysis of a Predominantly Black High School

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 9:00 am
  In Roundtable Session: Civic Education in an Era of Political Turmoil (Table 26)

Abstract

More schools in the United States are adopting restorative justice (RJ) as a response to the “hyper-disciplining” targeted at Black students and other marginalized students. That said, if educators conceive of RJ as an adult-centric intervention, it risks losing its transformative potential. Student agency and leadership, particularly in predominantly Black schools, must be understood as central to RJ. We apply Sewell’s (1992) theory of agency and schema to a transformative research collaboration with a predominantly Black high school. We find that the stakeholders embraced two new schemas through its RJ movement--(1) students as co-constructors of their community and (2) students as politically conscious actors—but that the school worked in contradictory ways to support or disrupt these new schemas.

Authors

• Olivia Marcucci, Johns Hopkins University

• Rowhea M. Elmesky, Washington University in St. Louis