Transformative Justice: A Necessary Paradigm Shift for Education in the United States

• In Event: More Than a School-to-Prison Pipeline: Collaborating With Teacher Educators, Teachers, Researchers, and Community Stakeholders to Transform Education for Social Justice

Abstract

This presentation outlines a transformative justice framework that school-based educators can learn to use to establish and maintain a nonpunitive culture of justice, accountability, inclusion, and academic success in K-12 classroom and school communities. The presenter begins by offering a definition of restorative and transformative justice in the context of education. The focus then turns to the ways discipline as punishment tends to criminalize and dehumanize Black and Brown students.

Professor of education Sabrina Vaught (2017) and others have demonstrated that public education has not been a positive experience for the collective communities of Black and Brown students. There has been a history of state sanctioned schooling centering its curriculum on white middle class values, which privileges white students and marginalizes and silences non-white students (Staiger, 2004; Castagno, 2008). Under-resourced schools, whiteness as standard in school curriculum, physical and hidden enclosures, and patterns of dehumanization and criminalization have been shown to have damaging effects on the educational and life outcomes for Black and Brown students.

Next, the presenter makes a case for a Transformative Justice Teacher Education and describes what a transformative justice classroom looks like. Subsequently, the presenter offers valuable learnings from the historical context of Independent Black Institutions to draw connections between practices that were extremely successful in the past and the urgent need today to disrupt the patterns of marginalization, exclusion, and criminalization that continue to result in an alarming number of Black and Brown youth in the United States navigating the court system rather than a positive schooling trajectory. The presenter then introduces four pedagogical stances, History Matters, Race Matters, Justice Matters, and Language Matters (Author, 2018), for engaging restorative and transformative justice in education, and proposes a relevant fifth stance, Futures Matter (Author, 2019) that builds on best practice from the Independent Black Institutions model by focusing on jointly-cultivated, integrated practices of accountability, inclusion, and academic success.

Author

• Maisha T. Winn, University of California - Davis