Pre-service teachers’ perceptions of restorative practices as a carceral intervention

• In Event: Implementing Restorative Practices in Schools: Perspectives From Practitioners and Researchers

Abstract

Restorative practices (RP), which seek to address harm and foster accountability, are often talked about as a solution to address the school to prison pipeline (STPP). However, transformative and sustained change remains elusive. We posit that an enduring problem in addressing the STPP through RP is the pervasiveness of carceral logics and punitive mindsets - a steadfast belief in imposed consequences and escalation of consequences to repeat behavior. When implementation of RP fails to unearth the root of the logics that built and uphold the systems, how those logics show up in the everyday ways that impact everyone, we fail to practice in ways that model liberated futures. Outcomes data demonstrates the ways that the criminal legal system is designed to perpetuate the race-based caste system and is enraging to those seeking to move past a responsive stance. However, relying on measurement of outcomes to demonstrate RP effectiveness is dangerous when considering the inability to capture resistance to restorative approaches due to carceral logics and beliefs that are both ingrained in the education system and held by individual education professionals. Relying on numbers to tell the story of racial equity in a school assumes the data being reported is captured and analyzed without bias, and does not acknowledge the resistance or challenges present. These data may demonstrate a decrease in certain discipline practices, but do not provide an understanding of how restorative practices may impact the material and cultural reality of BIPOC students.

It is necessary, then, to investigate how education professionals develop beliefs regarding discipline and punishment. Critical examinations of the experiences of restorative practitioners reveal there is much to be learned about the forces driving or undermining change efforts (Romano & Arms Almengor, 2021). Teacher professional development is often an unexamined component of RP research (Mayworm et al., 2016), and when professional development does occur, it rarely includes any focus on race or the racial discipline gap (Dhaliwal et al., 2023). This raises serious concerns as preliminary research suggests teachers’ attitudes and beliefs around race and racism play an important role in their discipline strategies (Thyberg, 2023). A recent review of the literature by Welsh (2023) emphasized the importance of professional development for educators in reducing racial disparities in discipline, highlighting an intervention aimed at shifting teacher mindsets from punitive to empathetic while addressing racial implicit bias resulted in a significant reduction in suspension rates for Black and Hispanic students, and racial disparities in discipline were nearly cut in half for that school year.

Missing from the research focusing on implementation of restorative practices in the United States is an explicit examination of future school personnel (pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) conceptions of discipline. We will interview pre-service teachers to understand their beliefs about school discipline, the school to prison pipeline, and restorative practices, and how those beliefs have developed. Using inductive qualitative analysis and the constant comparative methods (Glaser, 1965), the data will help to form an understanding of how front-line educational professionals view punitive discipline and its alternatives.

Authors

• Ceema Samimi, University of Minnesota

• Kara Beckman, University of Minnesota