When we spoke with youth, educators, and parents about what restorative justice means to them, they told us it’s a “worldview,” “a way of being,” an entire approach to community that is “deeply entrenched” in the culture of a school. It’s a philosophical stance, envisioning a world where relationships are rooted in the understanding that we are all learning, growing, and healing alongside each other, in and out of conflict. Participants described restorative justice as a holistic approach to community care and healing that builds upon a foundation of relationships, shared values, mutual support, and key practices. Or in Bianca’s words, “It’s unconditional love,” a sense of community belonging and responsibility that does not disappear in moments of conflict, harm, or community struggle. (Read more about how the On Our Terms team thinks about and defines restorative justice.)
Read More...As a society, we tend to put the spotlight on the “wrong-doer” when harm and conflict occur, investing our time and energy into punishing that person and removing them from our communities. Rarely, if at all, do we ask people who have been harmed: “What would help you heal? What makes you feel supported? What might help you feel whole?” Restorative justice asks us to do just that, focusing on the healing needs of those harmed, and collectively addressing root causes of how and why such harm occurred in the first place. No one is disposable in this healing-centered approach, as restorative justice seeks to support everyone involved in moving through and healing from this experience: those harmed, those who have caused harm, and our broader communities.
Simply put, restorative justice is relational work. Students, educators, and parents emphasized the central role of strong relationships and supportive communities in restorative justice work specifically, and their school cultures as a whole. Relationship building with consistency and care creates the trust and comfort needed to try something new, speak openly, and believe that others have our best interests at heart. On the other hand, experiencing restorative practices, like community building circles, provides a structure to keep growing with each other in respectful, caring ways. (You can learn more about practical approaches to building relationships in Make Rituals & Relationships.)
It is these supportive, reliable relationships that make youth and adults feel like they can show up as our full, complicated, emotional selves, knowing we’ll be cared for and have a role to play in caring for others. For many we spoke to, this is the real transformative potential of restorative justice in our schools. As Nori R. put it, “How do we make space for our voices and our feelings to be heard and validated? And how do we honor where other people are at, and collaboratively move towards where we want to go?”
Listen to Community Voices
Hear from students, parents, and educators about why healing and relationships are central to building restorative school cultures.
“The way I think about it is, RJ needs good relationships, and then you do the RJ better, and then the good RJ leads to better relationships…. it’s very cyclical in its nature. And really the goal is this building of relationships and having a community and having people care that they’ve harmed the community. But I just keep coming back to this idea that it changed for us as school when it felt like it was a stance, a way of being, as opposed to a bunch of things that are happening.”
“The basis of what the school is about, they’re looking at the whole child. They’re building a lot of the social-emotional learning of the child and making sure that… they’re well in their own body and their own feelings and their emotions and that they’re able to express that. That’s just as important as what’s happening academically…. that they’re regarded culturally, emotionally…. [In our school] we are supported, as they’re growing, these little people, and trying to figure out who they’re going to be as grownups. And I always ask my kids, ‘What kind of human do you want to be? What kind of person do you want to be? How do you want to be within your community?’ And ideally, schools would be able to help students figure some of this out.”
“I think [it’s important to be] affirming students’ feelings and emotions a lot, letting them be in the classroom. Like allowing for anger to be expressed if something is upsetting a student. Allowing for laughter to happen for a while if something funny is happening. I just feel like affirming students’ feelings [is important], so that there’s not this message that they’re doing something wrong by having an emotional reaction.”
“adrienne maree brown talks about ‘small is all,’ and the small reflects the large… relationships are really part of building the momentum for having an actual restorative or transformative culture, not one that’s co-opted and looks nice on a website. Like what’s actually happening [in our school] is all these random people are showing up to something because they feel like it and they know that you’ll see them and that they’ll have a chance to talk. And most people, when they show up to a place where they feel welcome, they show up more as themselves, even if they’re not sure who that is yet. And I’m not just talking about kids, I’m talking about staff too…. it’s all these different root connections happening at once, in all these different directions, and the hierarchy starts to peel away. Definitely power dynamics still exist, but we’re able to act more as members of the community, instead of just roles in the community.”
“There was a [long running] conflict with staff… Recently, administration kind of self-reflected and was like, okay, I think we didn’t handle this the right way before so let’s do what we do with our students, let’s have a restorative process with this. And so it was a multiple-step process and multiple mediations… a group reentry circle… said agreements on how we’re gonna move forward… I was just very pleased because I feel that restorative work has to be something that’s embedded in the community and has to be modeled by everyone in the community. And it’s not just you know, this is what we want students to do. But if we are really a restorative school or about that restorative life, then everyone needs to be participating in that process.”
“If someone feels that they have agency, if they’re respected, if they’re treated with dignity…. that is the goal of restorative practices, as I see it. Self-determination. Treat me as a human being. See me as an equal. Hear my voice. Know who I am. Accept that I have a place here at the table with you. I have not seen it done that way that often, because there always seems to be power imbalances, and it’s very hard to get rid of those power imbalances. I know people want things that are genuinely student-led and students are actually leading these processes… The only way it’s eventually going to work, is maybe if schools eventually have a board that’s actually a real student board that’s actually guiding the schools, with genuine student leadership.”
Work through Contradictions
Vent Diagrams help us reflect on the challenges, complexities, and contradictions of doing this work, and figure out how we can keep moving forward. Here is one of the big tensions we heard from participants about centering healing and relationships in school.
School communities need healing
Schools aren’t designed with healing in mind
Talk with Your Community
What does this look like for you and the people in your life? Use the prompts below to explore ideas about healing and relationships with others in your school and communities, laying the groundwork for community understanding and making change. (Check out the Community Conversations Toolkit for downloadable guides for facilitating discussions about this project.)
Explore. What messaging have you received about who needs to heal, or how that healing might happen?
Share Experiences. Can you share a time when you had a sense of belonging with others? How did it feel for you?
Envision. Describe your dream community. What does it look like and feel like? What are friendships and relationships like there?
Explore. What does healing mean to you?
Share Experiences. Can you think of a time when you felt yourself experiencing healing? Who was with you, and what role did they play? What did you need during that time?
Envision. What would your community look like if it was equipped with what people needed to heal?
Make It Happen
The young people, educators, and parents we spoke with shared incredible examples of how they are centering healing and relationships in their schools, as well as visions of the world we must keep fighting for… This is what restorative justice looks like, when it’s On Our Terms.
Build School Practice.
Here are specific ideas about how we can center healing and relationships within restorative justice and culture in schools.
- Integrate restorative circles and other opportunities for relationship building, sharing personal experiences, and reflection throughout school life, including in classrooms, advisory, staff meetings, and community-wide events.
- Create community-wide gatherings for reflection and celebration with students, their families, and staff, such as town halls, rallies, and family nights, with an emphasis on strengthening intergenerational bonds, storytelling, and sharing hopes and ideas for the future of the school.
- Ensure administrators support staff through regular meetings that focus on the changing needs of teaching and support staff. If an administration is able to hold the needs of their staff, it increases capacity for staff to hold the needs of their students.
Nori R. (she/her), school staff: “Every student was expected to lead [a community building circle] at least once before they graduated and so that was scary for some students, but they eventually did it with the support of even their peers. And so… how do you put them in that leadership role with support but also provide them with feedback, right?… I think of that space as a place where we not only built relationships with students but also students with one another. We empowered them [the students]. They were able to use their leadership skills [to lead community building circles]. And it was a space of joy, but also a place where, when there was community wide harm… we could address it in what I like to think of as a safe environment. Students were like, ‘Oh man, our school’s really struggling with this,’ like if there was a fight up the block, away from school, we’ll be like, ‘What happened yesterday? Let’s have a community discussion.’ And students will come up and open up to and even call each other out. So it wasn’t led by the adults right, as like ‘You did this,’ but students were kind of like, ‘We need to protect our community’.”
Demand Policy Change.
Here are some key policies needed to better support our schools in centering healing and relationships within restorative justice and school culture.
- Ensure that restorative justice training offers a holistic, intersectional approach for school culture, not just as an “alternative to suspension.” Specifically, it should: emphasize the role of community building and prevention; integrate an anti-oppression and anti-racist lens about the origins of restorative justice and its use in schools; and, interrogate power dynamics within schools that may pose barriers to building restorative school cultures (e.g., adult – student hierarchy)
- Provide and fund restorative justice training for all DOE staff, as well as student and parent leaders in school communities and in citywide positions, including intergenerational training experiences.
- Allocate specific time and funding to support community-building and healing practices and programs in schools (e.g., expand advisory to all schools, discretionary funding for community events, adult- and peer-led mentorship programs, discretionary funds to provide key support after incidents of harm).