Subverting the Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline Through a Restorative Justice Project: PDS Teacher-Residents' Retrospections, Transformations, and Resolutions

• In Event: Exploring Inquiry, Culturally Responsive Teaching Practices, and Discourse-Based Pedagogy in Professional Development Schools

Abstract

This collaborative teacher-inquiry examines a year-long Restorative Justice Practice project implemented in a PDS teacher residency program in 2020-21. Through this field-based, critically-reflective, and collaboratively-enacted teacher-inquiry, three faculty and 9 teacher residents worked toward racially-just, equity-based, and responsive relational and instructional practices in order to address the educational debt and systematically work toward dismantling schooling as a primary contributor to the cradle-to-prison pipeline. Educators analyzed their classrooms, instruction, and relational interactions (shaped by inequitable policies and practices both caused by and predating Covid-19) through lenses of restorative justice, systematically coming to see and value the complexity of learners, the foundational need for caring classroom communities, relevant and responsive instruction, and transformative justice practices.

Authors

• Teresa R. Fisher-Ari, Rollins Center for Language and Literacy

• Will Smith

• Molly Brown, Georgia State University

• Kristina Montalban, Georgia State University

• DaShaunda Patterson, Georgia State University

• Brittany White, Georgia State University