Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Restorative Practices in Education
33 Plays6 months ago
In Episode 4 of Season 2, we're talking about restorative practices in education
In this episode we hear from...
- Aaron James Nakai, who gives a compelling story about accountability from teacher to student
- Sheryll McDaniels gives an intimate portrait of an experience she had regarding criminalization in schools and the type of accountability that she wished she would have received
- Justice on Both Sides author, professor and dean Maisha T. Winn, who sits down for our Mic Check..1,2,3! round table segment alongside educators Kenjus T. Watson and Jewell Bachelor to talk about the roots of restorative justice, what it means to embody and implement its tenets and centering justice
Drawing From The Well is hosted by Tiffani Marie.
The podcast is co-produced by Tiffani Marie and Jon Reyes with music by Jansen V.
DFTW is supported by Community Responsive Education. Continue the conversation at youthwellness.com
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:02
Speaker
Drawing from the Well is a podcast series from the youth wellness movement. We are educators, researchers, healers, parents, and community members striving to repurpose schools to address the critical wellness gaps in our youth's development.
00:00:19
Speaker
Founded by Community Responsive Education.
00:00:25
Speaker
As an educator focused on implementing restorative practices, I learned many things about schools, about this idea of restorative practices being implemented within schools.
00:00:40
Speaker
learned lot about myself as an adult, as an educator. learned a lot about other educators and had many important glimpses into what's possible on a micro level between young people and adults and shifting relationships to be more equitable, more honest, more authentic perhaps.
00:01:05
Speaker
I also unfortunately probably witnessed more of How the system of schooling is so counter to what's needed to build restorative practices, restoration, reconciliation. yeah There's a whole plethora of ideas, experiences, opportunities, and challenges as educators who are committed to swimming upstream and shifting culture, really shifting culture in a school sort of One classroom at a time, one period at a time, and one interaction at a time, honestly.
00:01:43
Speaker
I found that within one school day, there are innumerable amounts of opportunities for righting harms, particularly harms that are endured by students, by young people, through their interaction with the adults around them, and just...
00:02:01
Speaker
harms that come between students as a result of how schools are set up and kind of the impacts of the structure. It felt at times that there's just too much actually.
00:02:16
Speaker
a lot of the discernment around what to respond to often became more clear through egregious impacts that were born by children that we worked most closely with.
00:02:31
Speaker
It became increasingly more difficult to appeal to the sensibilities of adults in positions of power who were not used to putting themselves on equal terms with younger people, with their students, with their charges, and it often became perceived as an attack, I would say, on the adult's professionalism or the adult's expertise or knowledge, when in fact much of my and our team's intentionality and impetus for doing restorative work was was really to help to create relationships that are dignified.
00:03:21
Speaker
that any of us deserve that would be more fulfilling, more collaborative and non-coercive type of relationship. So I think that's one of the the biggest challenges i can recall, particularly with adults in the framing of this work and the why.
00:03:41
Speaker
The purpose. There's one particular situation when a young man, a young black man, was accused by a teacher of having weed on his person in a class.
00:03:55
Speaker
The teacher caught a strong smell of weed somewhere in the classroom and pretty much profiled the young man. Accusing him, i think, sent him out, creating a lot of embarrassment, a lot of shame, anger, and injustice.
00:04:11
Speaker
The young man had no weed on him and really came to us exasperated at not being heard, at not having had a say, you know, being falsely accused and removed unjustly from the classroom, from his learning space.
00:04:28
Speaker
There's a lot of things that stand out to me about that moment or about this interaction, but really particularly how hurt the young man was, his intentions and efforts being totally misread, totally disregarded, disrespected. And so there was a ah kind of a crumpling of spirit that really, i think, helped us understand and discern the seriousness of needing to repair the situation and needing to create space for a conversation of accountability, not on the part of the young person, but on the part of the teacher who had wrongly accused the young man. And so it was by no means an easy ordeal. our seriousness and our vigilance with regard to the young man's feelings and needs was really strong.
00:05:19
Speaker
We essentially had to provide a space, provide frameworks, provide scaffolding to facilitate repair that included more space for the young man to be heard and actually more space for the adult to contemplate their own assumptions, miscalculations, implicit biases, provide greater opportunity to really hear and connect, created prompting questions or even maybe had a template for an apology that didn't function and serve simply as a statement, but was an opening for a more relational process.
00:05:59
Speaker
The apology served as a tool to build more relational capital, to provide the adult space to see themselves in relationship to what was happening, in relationship to this young black man, to take responsibility.
00:06:16
Speaker
It was profound how much it took, how much human power and how much swimming upstream and really countering what's happening in the school to stop that, to pause and to do something different that honored the humanity of the young man.
00:06:33
Speaker
Most profoundly from that one situation, i walk away with the look on the young man's face, how much his spirit shifted from the initial harm to the place of having an adult in power in his classroom take responsibility in front of him in a sincere and authentic way.
00:06:56
Speaker
in a humble way. The young man's response to that was, I think, deep shock, surprise. and don't think he'd ever had that experience, perhaps, because it was very apparent, the surprise, you know, and also I would say the beginning of the healing of a harm, to bear witness to that and to see a young person experience an adult around them who has harmed them take responsibility and to sincerely apologize was really, really important.
00:07:29
Speaker
That's one story, one instance of hope that provided some insight to what's possible in a dynamic that is oftentimes feels impossible.
00:07:50
Speaker
What's up y'all and welcome to Drawing From The Well. I'm your host, Tiffany Marie, and today's episode focuses on restorative practices in education.
00:08:02
Speaker
You just heard from my dear friend, Aaron James Nakai, who gave a compelling story about accountability from teacher to student. Next up, you hear from my first teacher and my most favorite person on the face of the earth. And I know that's controversial to say, but I'm talking about my mama. Cheryl.
00:08:22
Speaker
My mom gives us a really deep and intimate portrait of an experience that she had with my brother around criminalization in schools at a very early age and the type of accountability that she wished she had received.
00:08:37
Speaker
And finally, we hear from author of Justice on Both Sides, profound educator, professor, and Dean, Myesha T. Nguyen, who talks to us about the roots of restorative justice, what it means to embody and and implement its tenets, and to serve the most important aspect of the term restorative justice, and that is justice.
00:09:08
Speaker
When my son and daughter were in second and third grade, they were two of only five black students in their elementary school. The year was 1990 and the place was South San Francisco, California.
00:09:22
Speaker
Both of my children scored extremely high on mandated tests and excelled in pretty much all subjects, but were each subjected to discriminatory actions during their entire time in that space.
00:09:38
Speaker
It was a very emotionally disruptive time, and particularly so ah for my son, who was repeatedly targeted by his teachers as being too rambunctious or for not paying enough attention in class, while at the same time his non-black counterparts were out loud as being funny, being a class clown, or full of energy.
00:10:03
Speaker
Ultimately, my son became so distressed with his experiences school that he actually started to sneak away from the rest of the children as they walked to school and he would return home. So I was at work and I had no idea of what was happening. You'd think that if that happened one time that the teachers would call me and tell me that he wasn't in school, but it didn't happen.
00:10:26
Speaker
And one day i was at work and i just had a strange feeling that I needed to head home right away. And when I got there, I found him at home all by himself in his bathrobe preparing a full breakfast for himself.
00:10:40
Speaker
I snatched him up and chastised him for not being at school. I made him get dressed and I took him right to school hand him over to his teachers. And so I trusted the teachers and the support staff members to assure him the school was the best place for an eight-year-old intelligent little boy like himself.
00:11:01
Speaker
But these folks turned to me and offered to call the police to report him as a truant. They actually wanted my child to be handcuffed. They wanted me to sanction it and be placed into a patrol car to teach him a lesson.
00:11:16
Speaker
He was eight years old. I was only 26 years old at that time, and I didn't fully understand the implications of the school staff's suggestion.
00:11:30
Speaker
I was offended and I was hurt that they believed my little black son needed to be criminalized without committing a crime. But I didn't see how dangerous it was. i don't think I realized how dangerous it was to insist that he and my daughter remain even for one more day and an environment that was so demoralizing and hateful.
00:11:55
Speaker
There was a part of me that still trusted that staff to do what was right for my children, and I shouldn't have. And I still ruminate about that time, and I regret not having had the knowledge or the support to have been more proactive and to have effectively protected my children.
00:12:37
Speaker
What's up, y'all? We're here with Mike Check, one, two, three, with Kendris Jewel and Tiffany Marie. We got a special, special guest today. Oh my goodness. We got with us, Maisha T. When? It's a T in there, right? In the middle? There is a T. There's a T. I'm about to tell you what it stands for. I was going to ask you because when Snowball was on here, we wanted to know what the O stood for. So, okay, I can tell you the T is Tulebu. Ooh. It's a Kiswahili name like Maisha. Tulibu means quiet and serene. Maisha or Aisha is life.
00:13:12
Speaker
So put together, the vision that my parents had was that I would have a quiet and serene life drama free. i love that. How has that worked out?
00:13:25
Speaker
It's been beautiful. You know, you project the things that you want to have. And that's right. And our naming processes used to be about that. Right. Projecting what it was that we wanted. she Yes. Yes. our family
00:13:40
Speaker
That's a little bit about you. I mean, I'm hoping that you can give us a little bit more. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you spend your time, your days doing. Well, first and foremost, I am a mother. I'm the mother of an 11-year-old and an eight-year-old, two self-identified boys.
00:14:02
Speaker
They are fun. They are funny. They're just jewels. Really grateful to and for them. um interestingly enough, a golf mom. They both are in competitive golf. My husband and I have to split shifts and caddy for them and...
00:14:16
Speaker
We have been catapulted into a new world that we were not a part of ah prior to their passion and interest. So that's been interesting and really fun. I'm glad they chose a sport where I'm exercising, getting my steps in,
00:14:32
Speaker
and not sitting in the stands eating nachos. That's probably good. And I'm the partner of Tori Nguyen. He and i co-founded and co-direct our research center, the Transformative Justice and Education Center in the School of Education at UC Davis, where we're both on faculty.
00:14:49
Speaker
I also spend some of my day associate deaning. I'm the associate dean of curriculum. I write, I read, I think on my favorite days, that's kind of what I'm focused on. and I'm also a daughter. My father lives around the corner, so I'm very connected to his care.
00:15:07
Speaker
He turns 80 this year. So yeah, family first and then everything else. Nice, nice. Where are you from? You from ah Davis, California? are you from?
00:15:20
Speaker
Tiffany Marie, the way you said that. We'll talk about that later. Shade against Davis. No shade against Davis. Shout out to Davis. We love you, Davis. Remember when Tupac shouted out Sacramento? Sacramento, where you at?
00:15:36
Speaker
Sacramento's right here. last you You know, when he did that, we just, I still fall out when I hear that. So I'm from Sacramento, often in Bay Area shadow, but I was born and raised here as was my mother, but I did go to UC Davis undergrad. So I have come this sort of interesting journey.
00:15:56
Speaker
circle back to my undergraduate space and my father used to teach at UC Davis. He was the first Black instructor hired in the History Department to teach Black Studies in the History Department. They were trying to keep the ethnic studies at bay and over in their own departments and not necessarily integrated into the humanities. So He was a controversial hire at the behest of the Black Student Union who fought to get this position. And the then president of the Black Student Union actually was a part of my father's hiring process. That's his favorite part of the story, that his last interview was with the BSU president who got to make the final decision. Yeah.
00:16:39
Speaker
So talk about students and power. i just love that story. Very nice. So you shared a little bit about being a golf mom, a partner, but when I know your name and I know your work, I have been introduced to you in this realm of restorative justice.
00:16:59
Speaker
And I remember in our pre-interview, I was like, You know, our episode is on restorative practices and education. you were very clear with me that you don't do that. you don't play that. You're very intentional around the language of restorative justice.
00:17:14
Speaker
Can you share a little bit about why you shared that with me? And then also like, What brought you to this work? Thank you so much for those questions. So yes, I am pretty adamant about using restorative justice intact just like that.
00:17:31
Speaker
I am a former educator. I taught elementary school. I taught high school. I understand the need for practice. I understand why practice feels important in education settings, particularly in school settings.
00:17:43
Speaker
However, when we omit the word justice from restorative justice, I think we lose sight of what we're supposed to be focused on. We lose sight of the task.
00:17:54
Speaker
I feel like we have to reclaim the word justice that I think is unfortunately linked to our criminal justice system and try to redefine it and bring it back to something that makes sense for all of us.
00:18:06
Speaker
And so i think the rush to practice is overlooking the really important mindset work that is a part of this thing that we call restorative justice, because you can't practice something if you don't fundamentally believe in the principles and philosophies that undergird the work.
00:18:25
Speaker
So I see a lot of practice, i.e. let's get into the circle, but you still might have the racial disparities in terms of who's being mistreated, kicked out, suspended, isolated, but you still have that circle. And so you visibly have this practice, but you don't really embody the values of the practice.
00:18:45
Speaker
I have to credit my first restorative justice teacher, Sujatha Baliga. She's a restorative justice attorney, was recently awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant for her work.
00:18:58
Speaker
She's a systems changer, so she definitely works with judges and district attorneys and worked with Alameda County folks in San Francisco and all over the country. She even did capital murder case in Florida that's been written about in the New York Times.
00:19:14
Speaker
I got to spend a better part of a year learning from and with Sujatha, Nuri Nusrat, Sia Henry, all restorative justice attorneys. At the time, they were all with Impact Justice.
00:19:26
Speaker
And i got to, i feel, learn about the integrity of what it means to think about restorative justice as a paradigm shift from punitive ways of being in relationship with each other to thinking about what I call the art and science of making things right and keeping things right. So this was 2015 and I had this William T. Grant Fellowship to spend time with Sujatha and her colleagues.
00:19:51
Speaker
And I remember we had this meeting right in her living room and she said, you know, Myesha, I feel like your role in this work is really becoming the paradigm shift communicator that education needs.
00:20:02
Speaker
And I was so glad that I first studied with Sujatha and her team because what we were seeing in schools was the practice and mostly the circles.
00:20:13
Speaker
But what wasn't seeing, experiencing in schools was the philosophy and the ideology and the way that people who truly believe in restorative justice try to embody that in all parts of what they do.
00:20:27
Speaker
So they were my first teachers, so to speak. Nice. Can you... Talk a little bit more about particularly what you were seeing in schools or what you have experienced. I know we all have our stories here and some of us have been those stories in experiencing criminalization and alienation in schools. But can you share a little bit about what you have maybe seen or experienced that has really informed your practice of restorative justice?
00:20:59
Speaker
Absolutely. So in my book, Justice on Both Sides, I detail one particular high school community that I followed that I felt was working really hard to make this thing called restorative justice work in their schools.
00:21:14
Speaker
They had a program where students were actually being trained as student circle keepers. And so students were largely holding the space when harm was done in the schools, which was very interesting. Mm-hmm.
00:21:29
Speaker
Restorative justice was not the only response to harm that they had in the school. They still had youth court. So I talk about how these two things were coexisting and how in a true restorative justice space, you can't have both of those together. You have to say, we are doing restorative justice because the youth court still uses all the criminal justice language. You still have a jury. You're still giving a sentence. You still have...
00:21:53
Speaker
someone who's deciding what action happens to another as opposed to building consensus around how we respond to this as a community. However, so there's two things. One thing is that the students who were trained as circle keepers who went through a rigorous restorative justice training, you know, the five full days with all the different processes, they were amazing. They were intellectually rigorous with their thinking and the way that they approach their work.
00:22:22
Speaker
They were thoughtful. They had empathy. They cared so much about their classmates. And in many ways, their own views of harm and wrongdoing changed. So students would say things like, wow, I just thought, you know, you do something bad, you go to jail and that's it. And I was full with that, you know, and now I'm thinking about what it means to support somebody who may be harming someone else because maybe they've gone through something.
00:22:47
Speaker
So it gave them a different lens to view their classmates and colleagues. Another thing that really came out of the student training was that something that maybe all of us take for granted, or maybe we don't, I'm a little older than you are, but the notion of confidentiality in a social media space, the word confidentiality meant almost nothing to a lot of the young people. And so the way that confidentiality is lifted up as a cornerstone of restorative justice work.
00:23:13
Speaker
It was almost like a new vocabulary word for the young people. and they thought, wow, I don't have to go over here and tell this person about somebody else's business or this thing that happened. I could just go directly to the person and we can have a conversation and work it out. So they were you know reconnecting with this word restorative justice and confidentiality.
00:23:31
Speaker
On the other hand, something that I think was happening was my concern around the gendering of the work and how when you looked at the students who were committed to the circle keeping work, by far there were more Black girls who were involved in doing the work and doing the emotional heavy lifting for the school.
00:23:50
Speaker
And this is consistent with research around Black girls in education, what's been referred to as the adultification of Black girls, Black girls being seen as the help.
00:24:02
Speaker
the helpers in the classroom when they're not being vilified for other things. And so there was that. They were mostly Black girls or Black and Latinx boys or queer, intersectionality of queer, Black, Brown, and some white girls. And none of the white male students at the school were involved in the student circle keeping. So I was really curious about how even in this best case scenario where the school is really trying to build this culture That it wasn't seen that this was everyone's issue. Like, how can you talk about this being a community response if not everyone in the community is involved?
00:24:40
Speaker
And it looked that way with the staff and the administrators who were involved, the white women administrators and staff, staff of color, including men and women of color. That was another thing that I thought was really interesting. And then the circle processes themselves, the school wasn't always paying fidelity, I think, to those processes. So for example, if you're in a repairing harm circle, typically the person who caused harm as well as the person who's been harmed will have an advocate or someone who knows them really well, who can say something wonderful about this young person.
00:25:12
Speaker
And sometimes because of time, I'm sure, and many other things, the person who may be quote unquote in trouble would be in a circle just with themselves, with other people.
00:25:23
Speaker
And it felt more like confessional. The focus is still on you and what you did wrong. And we're in this space to still... in some ways interrogate you and not necessarily have this larger experience.
00:25:36
Speaker
And so that's what I mean when I'm talking about paying fidelity to the process, to the philosophy, to the theory. And that's why you can't lose the term justice because then we're just walking around here not knowing where we're going. We're just bumping into walls because we're not focused on what we're trying to actually access.
00:25:54
Speaker
Wow. Just like with critical pedagogy, with culturally responsive pedagogies, different approaches I've seen restorative justice used as a carrot to get young people to do school more effectively and more efficiently. And so if we're going to reduce this, it's not necessarily a pathway toward freedom.
00:26:14
Speaker
not necessarily a pathway toward healing, but for management of schools and schooling and to make it more effective. So I appreciate that. I think in some of my questioning, I've jumped ahead a little bit.
00:26:25
Speaker
I want to go back. because I've been engaged in some of the work and we all have studied it, but I think for listeners, wanna slow down a little bit and just actually acknowledge like what is restorative justice?
00:26:38
Speaker
And can you share a little bit about the history of this work? Absolutely, thank you so much for taking us back to the foundation. So restorative justice is paradigm, paradigm so paradigm shift.
00:26:52
Speaker
I often describe it as the art and science of making things right, of being in right relationship to all living things. There are some really interesting thinking around its origins. There are certainly Indigenous communities, particularly those in Canada bordering places like Minnesota, that have been credited with introducing restorative justice work.
00:27:15
Speaker
to people in the United States. So Kay Pranus, who is a restorative justice practitioner from the Midwest and often credited for a lot of restorative justice work will say that that's where she learned her work and that there's really no one who could take sort of ownership of it. But the restorative justice that I think we understand and know about in this Western world, interestingly started with some conversations around how to revisit Christianity.
00:27:43
Speaker
Howard Sayre, who wrote the book Changing Lenses, was a white man who grew up in a Mennonite community. He also went to Morehouse and learned what it was like to be a minority, if you will, in that space, but also how to be someone who could be held accountable for doing really good work and better work and moving outside of his comfort zone.
00:28:06
Speaker
He wrote the book Changing Lenses to challenge people who define themselves as Christian to revisit this sort of eye for an eye. punishing, punitive culture that can be endemic to the faith.
00:28:17
Speaker
So what's really interesting about the first edition of Changing Lenses is it talks about restorative justice just purely in terms of those relationships. But in the 20th anniversary edition, which I think came out in like 2015 or 2016,
00:28:32
Speaker
He actually names racial justice and equity as the cornerstone and foundation for why we do restorative justice work. Of course, he's not the first to call for that. I think Fania Davis is one of the key people I go to when I think about restorative justice work. She's the founder of Our Joy, Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth.
00:28:53
Speaker
And Fania Davis defines restorative justice as this interrelated web that we're all a part of And when we think about this web, we think about any rupture to that web harming the whole of the web.
00:29:07
Speaker
And I think that's one of the best images of restorative justice that we can even ask for. One of the student circle keepers who I refer to as Viola in my book, Justice on Both Sides, actually defined restorative justice as justice on both sides. How do we make things right for every party that's involved or who's involved?
00:29:26
Speaker
And her comments and her definition just kind of hit me so hard because I really, you know, young people, The young people will bring it. They will always find the right words. They have such a facility with language.
00:29:40
Speaker
They're just so pure in their approach. They're not as clouded as adults can be with the language. So this idea of restorative justice being justice on both sides, like you're really trying to find the good in everyone who's involved. And sometimes that's really hard.
00:29:56
Speaker
and trying to have that true sense of balance, right? That might be more of a representation of those scales that we always see than any other thing that I know. i will also say that Kay Pranis talks about something called the restorative impulse,
00:30:11
Speaker
which I think is also very helpful. Like, how is it that we keep pushing ourselves to think restoratively before we speak to people, before we react to people, when we feel like we could potentially be upset about something? Like, how can we tap into what's called the restorative impulse? Like trying to think about how do I just get this thing to a peaceful place where we can at least have a conversation? We don't have to agree.
00:30:40
Speaker
And I also want to say that restorative justice is not about forgiveness. Forgiveness is so burdensome and exhausting. And you know we're not always ready to say, I accept your apology.
00:30:51
Speaker
And we don't have to. And that often forgiveness, that burden weighs very heavily on a person who's been harmed. And so that is not a part of restorative justice. So I want to be really, really clear about that. It's not a program.
00:31:07
Speaker
As we see in the schools, it's not just a practice and it's not just circles. So there are also these branches in the criminal justice system context and some of the work that Sujatha and her colleagues did, they introduced restorative case conferences.
00:31:21
Speaker
I'll just come up with a scenario. So say that somebody broke into someone's car. And they took some things and this person who broke into the car, was discovered that they broke into the car.
00:31:32
Speaker
Typically they would go through a court process and, you know, be charged for whatever the case was. so With a restorative case conference, it would actually take the place of someone going through that court system and the person whose car was broken into along with the person who broke into the car, mediators would facilitate a series of conversations around what should be done to deal with the fact that you broke into this person's car.
00:32:00
Speaker
And then that person whose car was broken into, like say, I'm thinking about when my kids were little and I remember I used to park in this one place by Sujatha's office and she's like, you know, your car's probably gonna get broken into there. And I was like, but can they leave the car seats? Because I really don't have time to go looking for the right car seat. Like that is so hard. Like I want to put a note on my car. Like if you have to take the car, fine, but can you leave the car seats in the lobby of this building? So I don't have to...
00:32:23
Speaker
Go to Target or wherever and get a car seat. They're expensive. So I, as a mother, might want to say to this person, you know, when I got to my car and it wasn't there and then I couldn't pick up my kids on time. And then the preschool, the people there were there with my kids.
00:32:37
Speaker
And it made me look like a bad mother because I couldn't get them. and then when I did find a friend who could take me, we didn't have car seats and you can't have a three-year-old or four-year-old without a car seat. So you get to kind of process It's not just about the car. It's about like the inconveniences and the way that it reverberates and harms other people.
00:32:56
Speaker
And that person would have an opportunity to sit with you and kind of think about, well, what can I do for this person? What can we do so that we can make this thing right? Maybe I just want to be heard, you know?
00:33:08
Speaker
And that young person or older person or whoever took the car could also just talk about like, I did this because i was going to strip it. I was going to take these parts. I needed to sell it. I needed money for this. I needed that. Whatever it is so that you could kind of get a sense of where they were coming from. And you're just processing together, which is something that doesn't really happen in court processes.
00:33:29
Speaker
Hmm. There's just so much here. one of the things that stands out to me, but I want us to transition into this question is, like, I hear what inspired you to professionally go into restorative justice, but I am mostly interested on what this looks like in your personal life, because I also heard a comment from earlier where, and I'm also seeing this practice in schools where people know how to use the language of restorative justice, but i have never used this practice.
00:33:58
Speaker
And even when you're talking about this practice, I was under the impression that this was transformative justice. because my understanding of restorative justice is that restorative justice includes an institution like schooling.
00:34:12
Speaker
Transformative justice would not. So I'm really interested in like how you got into this language and behavior and practice, because a lot of people that I've seen, professionals, whether that is like leaders or teachers,
00:34:26
Speaker
Maybe they have certain language within their profession around restorative justice, but they're struggling with themselves. They're struggling with having, you know, dialogue and challenging conversations with adults.
00:34:39
Speaker
It doesn't seem like they're modeling restorative justice in their own personal life, yet they want and they have expectations that young people should hold this. yeah Thank you, Jewel.
00:34:49
Speaker
I initially talked about Sujatha being my first teacher in restorative justice, certainly in my professional space. But I would say that my first teacher around restorative justice personally was my mother, long before i had any restorative justice vocabulary. And certainly, i don't think she did either. I don't even know if it was a thing. So there was an incident that involved a family member. There was a some physical harm done to a family member. And i just remember my mother having a lot of clarity around not having police involvement.
00:35:25
Speaker
She did not want police involvement. Now I'm young. So I just, you know, when you're a kid, you think you get in trouble, the police are involved. You don't really know what else is there. And so I watched my mother,
00:35:39
Speaker
tried to navigate this thing on her own with the law enforcement trying to pressure her to participate in their process. And she decided she was going to try to go to the parents of the young folks who had caused the physical harm.
00:35:57
Speaker
And she was on her own, you know, like she was doing this by herself. Like she had to go find out who they were. She had to talk to people. and then she went to the folks house and these were African-American boys. That was the first time I heard someone say, like my mom saying, I don't want to have these black boys, no matter what they did involved with the police and that's not gonna help anything.
00:36:23
Speaker
And just her clarity around that, it seriously just washed over me. It was so powerful. Even my father was a little bit like, where are you going? Wait a minute. you know So she was really doing this. She believed in this.
00:36:36
Speaker
And so she went to a home where two of the boys lived and tried to have a conversation with the family. And they said, if they did that, then they're just in trouble. Like,
00:36:50
Speaker
and go to jail. Like, what's the problem? Like, what what don't you understand about that? you know And i just remember how much pain she was in that the families were like, yeah, sorry. Like, we're not going to have this conversation with you. We're not going process with you.
00:37:07
Speaker
We don't care. and they did something wrong They're bad. They bad. they're in trouble, you know? And she understood this to be part of something that was beyond even their understanding in terms of the positions that they held. And she saw it as being part of, you know, systemic undermining of our ability, black people's ability to love themselves.
00:37:32
Speaker
and to understand that they deserve better. And i just won't forget it. So that was probably my first introduction. And later when I learned this thing called restorative justice, I was like, oh that's what my mom was doing. That's what she was trying to do anyway.
00:37:47
Speaker
And I also learned early what those tensions could be because if you are already a part of a punitive culture and you have signed on to and you believe in it because you lack the imagination and vision to see a different kind of future,
00:38:01
Speaker
You're participating in it, even when it hurts you and your people and your family more than anybody else. So that is where I came to understand the ideology and how you embody it instead of just talking the talk.
00:38:17
Speaker
When I was a professor at Emory University, I was there for eight years in Atlanta. I worked with a women-focused theater company who worked with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated girls. Most of the girls were African-American.
00:38:30
Speaker
They started this program, which they offered playwriting workshops in youth detention centers, which translation, jail for children, regional youth detention centers, youth detention centers in and around the Atlanta area.
00:38:44
Speaker
And it was amazing. They took the girls through ensemble building activities. They took them through playwriting activities, taught them, you know, theater techniques. And these were professional actresses. They also did set design, costume design, and they were being paid. But, you know, minimally, they were doing it mostly from their hearts.
00:39:03
Speaker
They started doing this program because they were staging a play by a Black playwright named Kia Corthoran called Breath Boom. which is set in the Bronx and it really focused on African-American girls who are part of a gang.
00:39:16
Speaker
And so the actors had never been in a gang and didn't really know anything about that life. So they knew they needed to do some research, but they didn't want to just go and talk to girls who have been in gangs and say, hey, tell me what it's like to be in a gang.
00:39:29
Speaker
They had enough sense to know that that was not right. So what they did was they created an exchange. And they offered these workshops. And when they did it, they realized very quickly, like, we need more of this. This is this is it.
00:39:45
Speaker
I mean, we need to be doing this on top of staging these plays. And so they started this beautiful, powerful program, Playmaking for Girls. My book, Girl Time, is about playmaking for girls. So we would go and do these two day workshops in the youth detention centers.
00:39:59
Speaker
And on the second day, the girls would actually get to perform. Their families were invited in to see them perform. And they would also perform the plays for other young people who were incarcerated in the detention center.
00:40:11
Speaker
I spent six years interviewing different cohorts of girls after they were released from the detention centers and trying to just initially I'm a language literacy and culture scholar. So basically what that means is it's a beautiful space for anthropology, sociolinguistics and education to come together. And a lot of my work is using a phenomenological lens where I'm trying to understand something from other people's perspectives. And so i spent a lot of time with the girls trying to understand their experiences in this theater space and writing plays. I was very interested in the role of playwriting or playmaking, if you will, in how one began to see themselves as someone who was literate, literary, a writer, an artist.
00:40:57
Speaker
And very quickly, i started to care less about the literacy aspects of my study and my work and really be thinking about this bigger issue around justice, equity, access, opportunity, because going into these detention centers, pretty hard to ignore that most of everybody I was looking at was Brown.
00:41:16
Speaker
And you can't unsee that. I certainly knew about this with adults, but I hadn't really thought about what this was like for children. I hadn't even thought about children being in jail, to be honest with you.
00:41:27
Speaker
So all this to say that when I would interview these amazing student artists, so many of the incidents that led to them being in these detention centers started at school.
00:41:39
Speaker
They had no idea when they woke up that morning, when they got dropped off, when they walked to school, that they were going to be in jail at the end of the day. And there was nothing in their lives that would have told them that they were going to be in jail.
00:41:52
Speaker
So to me, just the fact that one could be in shock and awe, like we're not talking about people who were maybe involved in things that they knew could potentially lead to being arrested. we're talking about people who are going to school.
00:42:05
Speaker
And almost in every case, No one's parents were called. They literally were escorted from school to a police car and at the detention center. So a lot of times when mom's finding out, they may not even be in the Atlanta area. They may be in a youth detention center that is far.
00:42:23
Speaker
Like you have to have not only a car, a working car, a dependable car. Sometimes people didn't have that. And you're finding this out after your child's already out there. So you don't have the money to get lawyered up. You don't.
00:42:36
Speaker
have those resources to disrupt this thing that's happening. But I couldn't figure out how we got from the school to the detention center. And in my trying to understand but possibilities we had in between those two spaces, which when I was growing up, I think it was like you get a call home, first of all, and there's some conversation and in really great cases. You had a parent or a grandparent or somebody who could come and make this thing work out for you.
00:43:01
Speaker
But I learned about this thing called restorative justice and how there were some advocates who I think were on the right track, who were trying to leverage restorative justice processes in school settings to actively disrupt this people have referred to it as a pipeline, but I love Damien Sojourner talks about educational enclosures and how when we say pipeline, we're actually not really assigning responsibility for the work. It's kind of like saying slave or enslaved, right? We have to assign responsibility for what has happened.
00:43:34
Speaker
So i learned about this thing that we're calling restorative justice as a possible missing piece of this unfortunate educational enclosure that seem to impact the lives of Black students more than anybody else in our schools in this country.
00:43:52
Speaker
Actually, we continue to see that in the research. Even if Black children don't make up ah most of the demographic in a school population, we still find that the criminalization Is mostly of black children in certain schools, in certain settings.
00:44:10
Speaker
Yeah. So even if we're introducing RJ and say 100 kids, we used to have 100 kids getting suspended. Maybe we have five, but all five of them are still black.
00:44:22
Speaker
You know, so situations like that were starting to happen where people would be able to say, we have RJ here. But again, the mindset wasn't there. And therefore, the same old kids who were the ones still getting in trouble.
00:44:37
Speaker
That's what's coming up for me as you're talking, Maisha, about that mindset. And I so appreciate the invoking of your work along with Sojourner's. idea or concepts of the enclosure and the idea of a nexus, right? that there's this, Tiff and I talk about the major difference between schools and prisons is really about the mechanisms of control that they offer.
00:45:01
Speaker
And i hear in this conversation and framing, which is so appreciative, direct connections to, you know, some of the work within ah more, I guess, conventional or traditional abolitionist work around the prison industrial complex. Like the difference between a reformist reform and a radical reform and to me, a radical or necessary reform anything that stopped folks from being locked up or more greatly harmed.
00:45:28
Speaker
And we know when we go into these places where young people are captured in, I think, very familiar slave-like mechanisms that they're experiencing greater harm. So interruptions to that are necessary, even when they're, I think, ham-fisted a bit, right?
00:45:46
Speaker
And so getting rid of cash bail, it's a reform. It's not abolition, but it is a reform that I think stops more people from being locked up. And on its worst day, I've heard of like RJ circles being again, to your point, right, more of a circle or a practice and not as much informed by the ideology around them.
00:46:07
Speaker
I'm kind of wondering where you've seen some of this as well, like where are some of the best implementations of and engagements with and grounding in restorative justice, as you've described it, that at its, maybe at its most minimized place, it's a radical reform, but actually what it's supposed to be doing, right, as far restoration. And then if you could talk a little bit about where you see this being co-opted or disrupted or interrupted, the actual aims and goals.
00:46:38
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for that. And I think that's related to, I will just take this up very quickly. Jewel mentioned transformative justice as opposed to restorative justice. And your question can just reconnect me with what Jewel brought up. So our research center, for example, in the School of Education is the Transformative Justice and Education Center.
00:46:57
Speaker
And people said, I'd you were doing something called restorative justice. What's this transformative word? Like it was kind of a scary word for some people, I think. And so in the RJ community, there's been a lot of healthy discussion, healthy debate around the limitations of the word and the notion of restoration, right? Because then we have to start asking questions about who's worthy of restoration, who gets picked to go to the restorative justice circle as opposed to youth court, or who's just going directly to the principal's office to get kicked out because somebody is making those decisions. so
00:47:28
Speaker
We don't want to sugarcoat or assume that the utopia that people are imagining existed for some of our young people. So restoration and restorative is not enough. In many instances, we need a radical overhaul, Kenjus, to borrow from you.
00:47:46
Speaker
We need big, big change. So there's some work that our center did with the school district in Sacramento that I just, oh gosh, I love what they were doing. I'll tell you why I love what they were doing. The superintendent wanted it to be trained with her cabinet first.
00:48:02
Speaker
And I thought the fact that the superintendent and the folks who are making a lot of decisions wanted to have the experience and try to understand what this thing was and learn more.
00:48:14
Speaker
before just you know sort of outsourcing it to a principal or saying, can you do a few workshops here and there? That was amazing to us. So not only did we do that, but then it was a three-year implementation.
00:48:27
Speaker
So the second year, all we did was visit every single school in the district. We visited every elementary school, every middle school, and the two high schools. We had a chance to do focus group interviews with students, with staff, with parents, and with teachers.
00:48:47
Speaker
So this is before anybody's trying to do a workshop, trying to do a training, trying to do anything. We're just trying to understand together what we're seeing. And all of this is followed by debriefings with the school, with the superintendent, conversations. So that's two years of foundational groundwork before or even introducing restorative justice theory and practice to the actual school sites.
00:49:12
Speaker
So I know that that it's not something that would happen all the time, i will say that, but it's something that gave us such great inspiration and we found so powerful inspiring.
00:49:22
Speaker
It's the long work, right? It's not quick and dirty. It's long. It takes a while so that people could try on those clothes and that change and start to see how it would show up. And then you could do a little work, give people some space, see how they could implement it and then come back to it.
00:49:40
Speaker
I will name a name in the Bay Area. Certainly, our joy has been amazing. i think it creating infrastructure to support schools and doing the work. And sometimes I wonder if it takes time you know, an entity outside the schools. I talk and think about this a lot. I just gave a talk at Michigan State and although I hated to say it, I said, you know, there are moments that I have that I'm not sure if schools as they are currently configured have the capacity to really engage in this kind of work right now.
00:50:06
Speaker
I just don't know that. I have to be honest and it's not a knock. It's just my truth at this moment. I just, I don't know. I don't have clarity that it's possible right now, at least not widespread.
00:50:19
Speaker
Rita Alfred, who's with the Restorative Justice Training Institute in Oakland, has done a lot of really powerful work, specifically in middle schools, and she's actually written about that work. And so her case studies, which I think we're done with the Alameda County of Health,
00:50:33
Speaker
Wonderful publication about some of that work. And I think what they've been doing, what she's done is amazing. But even now her organization is outside of the schools. And so i also have seen a lot of really powerful work happening St.
00:50:49
Speaker
sneak paul And the St. Paul Public Schools took on this huge restorative justice project, again, long and ongoing. I've been working with them for about three years where they have restorative justice leads at a cohort of schools. So not every single school, but a cohort of schools.
00:51:07
Speaker
And the restorative justice leads are there to support and guide the principal, the teachers. And I have actually visited many times pre-pandemic the schools, the principals,
00:51:18
Speaker
Everybody's all in So when you see everybody being all in from leadership, to the students and everybody in between, that to me is one of the most ideal scenarios.
00:51:30
Speaker
And even in some instances, really trying to bring parents in. So I was just talking to my St. Paul colleagues about one of the circles that one of the middle schools had was for parents at lunchtime to talk about parent engagement.
00:51:45
Speaker
And their school, like so many other schools, they were having like the math night on Wednesday at 7 p.m. And nobody, you know, we're tired. Like 7 p.m. I mean, you know, I am an educator. I know how important all of these things are. I know how important it is to show up. But sometimes Wednesday night is just too hard to show up for math night, right?
00:52:03
Speaker
So they had a circle where parents were invited to respond to and define parent engagement. And you have parents in there saying,
00:52:14
Speaker
I'm making dinner. I'm making sure that everybody eats. I'm making sure the clothes are clean and everyone gets to the school. That's parent engagement to me. Like I'm making sure everybody has what they need so they can get to you.
00:52:26
Speaker
and i think it was such a powerful conversation because what schools were calling parent engagement and what parents were considering calling parent engagement were two different things. And if you didn't show up at the school on certain nights for certain things and you weren't an engaged parent, and this often fell on the shoulders of parents of color, who maybe they didn't get off work at four o'clock or five o'clock to make it in time to these things. So those are just a few examples to me of where things I thought worked well.
00:52:54
Speaker
And I do want to say that I really saw the value of training students as circle keepers. I thought it was amazing. However, the students can't carry...
00:53:06
Speaker
the onus of the responsibility of the restorative justice work. So to me, what would have bolstered that is one, if students had power, they didn't have power, they could facilitate a circle and then an adult in the building could still say, we're overriding that and this student has to go.
00:53:25
Speaker
So if you're not gonna really relinquish power, share the power, build consensus with the student, it's just performative. You get to say, it was a gorgeous program.
00:53:37
Speaker
And I'm thinking about the kids, the emotional intelligence of the student circle keepers off the charts. The black girls who were the student circle keepers, quite frankly, I understand why so many of them were doing it. They were just the compass of the place. They were on it.
00:53:49
Speaker
They were sharp. But it just wasn't their responsibility And I write about this in the book when one of the girls who was very lifted up by the school was like, look at her, she's so amazing. And she was.
00:54:03
Speaker
She just like broke down in our time together because she just said, I just want to go to PE e and play with my classmates. I'm so tired of being like the, you know, the chosen one for the face of the place to do all this work. I'm actually really tired. It's my senior year and I want to have a little fun and just go to PE. e And I just thought, wow, you know, just it's not the kid's responsibility. And Rita Alfred really helped me understand that. She's another one of my mentors and teachers. And she just said, this is not the young people's work. We messed it up.
00:54:34
Speaker
We're supposed to be doing the work. I don't want to see them doing that much work. When you were saying, I was thinking of the magical Negroes throughout Hollywood, like will be Goldberg's character and Karina. kar Is it Karina, Karina?
00:54:46
Speaker
Where she was the maid. Yes. Yes. Yes. I never saw that. Yeah. Like her presence, she made everything so perfect. I feel people will be seeing black girls in that way. Yes. As long as they, of course, stay in that role, in that capacity. Of course. I'm thinking about a lot of things as you are talking One is especially for classroom teachers, because I think when you're talking about how these children, they start the day at school and then they end up kidnapped by the juvenile system.
00:55:26
Speaker
It was an article I was had shared with Ken just a while ago where these like elementary school kids got pulled in from a fight they observed that happened on the weekend.
00:55:39
Speaker
yeah And the police elementary got called to their school. It was so intense because there were all these opportunities for adults to intervene. Namely, the police come to the school and they say, go get these kids.
00:55:53
Speaker
And there were adults who said, okay. So they go get the children, and these are babies who were literally kicking, screaming. And two of the officers were black men Their captain was a white man who was with them.
00:56:09
Speaker
And one of the black men who was experiencing it He said he had a lot of trouble going to get these babies out of class because he knew how horrific it was and he wanted to fight his captain. He wanted to challenge it.
00:56:24
Speaker
What could he do? So they held a prayer circle once he got the children outside the school before... I guess he prayed for protection for the children. I wish I was kidding.
00:56:36
Speaker
This is according to Tiffany's imagination. I know this is the second time I'm hearing this and this is horrifying. This was in 1863, you're saying? or it just No, this was this year. okay. This is 2021. I was like, this is last year. Okay, cool. Right, 2021. The circle, though. Yeah, and they have held a circle, ah held hands,
00:57:01
Speaker
And they put handcuffs on those children and took them I'm always thinking about that space and time between, and like you said, with the parents that your mom went to go visit and this very interesting adherence to the law, particularly from adults who, when you think about teachers who enter the field with the rhetoric that they are there to protect children, to support children in living, to be their best selves.
00:57:28
Speaker
And then, through my teacher coaching years, i am always marveling at people's choices. When they have young people in front of them, I'm like, of all the choices that you had, that's what you chose to do. So there's some weird adherence to the state, to the law.
00:57:54
Speaker
I see a lot of teachers regard and consent to that is even prospective teachers, there's this belief of what you have to do, which is usually associated with the harm of children.
00:58:09
Speaker
I'm interested in your take on that, of like these horrific decisions that adults make that actually could prevent a lot of the efficacy of this nexus that we're talking about. Like, what do you make of that?
00:58:23
Speaker
Yeah. Wow. Wow. wow
00:58:28
Speaker
um I'm thinking about ah quite a few things. You started with talking about the story that I shared that so many of these girls started off at school and could not understand how they ended up in jail. And I was just even thinking about my father who was born in 1942. And he would say things like, well, I knew I did not want to go to jail. So I just like stayed away from certain things. And in his head, there was this formula like,
00:58:51
Speaker
If you don't do certain things and not around certain people and in certain spaces, you're not going to go to jail. Right. And it was to him really clear, not necessarily without the understanding that there were other ways in which we became enclosed and ensnared and that.
00:59:06
Speaker
It might be that straightforward for some people, but it's not straightforward for everyone. But then I also think about even in my own child rearing, and I'm ah trying to do this and not be judgmental and just think about how there are messages think that you give your kids early on around right and wrong and all the pieces in between. And I try to be very careful about how I talk about these things, like even with so-called superheroes. And, you know, I talk about everybody's complicated. Like you could tell when they started learning like good and bad. and like, everybody's not just all good. Like we have moments, we have ebbs, we have flows and no one's all bad. Like no one is all bad. You know, my parents were very like,
00:59:46
Speaker
anti anybody referring to a child as bad. Like that was not, not use that language. You can not say, oh, that's a bad kid. Like no bad adult for saying that's a bad kid. Like no bad no bad kids. So you're trying to guide your children on this journey of making them feel like if they make good decisions that they can be in a good relationship with the universe and be relatively safe and okay. So there's that.
01:00:11
Speaker
And part of that is sometimes tethered to these rules and these things that you don't necessarily believe should be, but you're trying to at least guide them in a certain direction. And then at some point you kind of blow the whole thing up.
01:00:28
Speaker
And you start talking about the complexities in this thing that you're teaching them around. Yes, we want you to kind of go in this path, but there's also like some other folks on that path with you who could hurt you and who could decide that they don't like you and they just want to harm you anyway. They're going to snatch you up anyway. So I'm just thinking about all the complexities of that. We're in a meritocracy. So You know, when our school system is based on this idea and teachers are very much indoctrinated with this culture that if you do well, you do well. Like you work hard, you do well, you get your good grades.
01:01:06
Speaker
That's what it is. And when I... was first launching my work in teacher education, i would have this exercise where teachers would sort of map out their own educational trajectories and create these maps of kind of how they saw themselves understanding what they understand and learning and becoming who they became.
01:01:28
Speaker
And it was frightening how similar most of the stories were. Many of the stories were the romantic, like, I sat on my parents lap and they read stories and we went to the library and we, you know, were on time every day and we did this and we did that. And then these are the people who are becoming teachers and they believe that everything has to be in that working order for you to be a good student.
01:01:53
Speaker
Yeah. Right. And then you have someone like my father who will say, my mom didn't have time for me to be sitting on her lap reading. She told me I need to read my own books. And then I was sitting on my sister's lap and my sister was reading to me and she told my sister don't read to me because I was being lazy and I needed to read myself. Now my father has a PhD in history. He reads all day. He does all he does is read.
01:02:14
Speaker
But I'm just thinking about his mother was being very intentional and thinking she was teaching her child the right thing. Like you don't have time to be sitting on somebody's lap reading, read yourself. You need to find information yourself but in a traditional school world that's almost being mean right like what you didn't let your child sit on your lap you didn't you know like that's mean you know and so i think the narrative the people who control the narrative of what a good student is how you're supposed to be in school what school is supposed to be about
01:02:45
Speaker
the culture of power, if you will, that really impacts, I think, a teacher's relationship to a student. And of course, increasingly over the last couple of decades that I've been doing teacher education, what I have loved is having people come into the profession whose school wasn't a squeaky clean thing for them. It was hard. There was struggle.
01:03:06
Speaker
And those are the teacher's who are so impressive and amazing with lots of different kinds of students because they understand that it's not linear. There's not one way to achieve. There's not one way to succeed and that students, young people and their families have different entry points and they're more flexible.
01:03:27
Speaker
But I felt like early in my career in teacher education, there wasn't that flexibility. It was just so many people saw it as your story had to happen this way.
01:03:37
Speaker
And if it wavered and if it had any problems or drama, it just made you almost too problematic. And I think adults have projected that not just onto the children, but to the families.
01:03:49
Speaker
Or then they're able to connect with the children and say, okay, i me take care of this child because it's like a missionary thing. But then they're still talking mess about the families and the communities and the neighborhoods. And I don't think you can love and give a child everything they need if you're talking mess about their parents.
01:04:04
Speaker
And if you're criticizing their parents and you're talking about mom and how she sounds and what she wore when she came up to the school, you can't love that kid. it has to be a full engagement and loving of the whole family and the community. And that to me is the the heart of what is missing and what makes this work so hard.
01:04:22
Speaker
Tiffany, when you and I were talking and I was sharing with you that this mindset work is so important to me in restorative justice. and because of that, I wanted to try to conceptualize like what would people have to really believe and think to do the work And just through 20 years of just work with amazing educators who are doing lots of different great, work wonderful work with young people throughout the country. I worked with some amazing educators in New York and amazing educators in Atlanta and in the Midwest and now California. And I developed these five pedagogical stances that I argue are really essential to doing this work and their history matters, race matters, justice matters, language matters and futures matter.
01:05:12
Speaker
And certainly there are many other ways of mattering. I am not trying to take that away from anyone. I invite people to introduce other stances. But I started with those first four, actually before I even had futures, it was history, race, justice, and language.
01:05:28
Speaker
And i think there's obviously intersectional realities of all of those stances. But in each of those stances, i invite educator school communities, teaching learning communities to really think about what that stance means for your particular community, the local history of where your school, your learning community is located. Who was that school originally built for? Who was in the school when it first opened? How has that changed over time?
01:05:53
Speaker
When it changed, what were the attitudes of the staff, of the teachers? How did you respond to the changes? What are those personalized history? How do people historicize themselves and their relationship to that learning community?
01:06:07
Speaker
Race matters. Just naming that and being honest that all of us are inflicted with racist ideas, sometimes about our own people, that to use Bryan Stevenson's word, it's a disease, it's an illness that really is part and parcel of the enslavement of Africans.
01:06:24
Speaker
That if we're not active in constantly fighting back that disease, it can take over us, you know? And so really positioning educators in schools to think about the ways racist ideas impede people's relationships with the children in the building.
01:06:43
Speaker
Because to me, what you're talking about, these horrific things, they happen because people have somewhere in them, this belief that the children and their families are unworthy yes and undeserving of all good things.
01:06:59
Speaker
Yeah. all wonderful things and don't deserve every part of every good thing they could potentially offer as an educator. That to me, that's it right there. You just don't really think this person is worthy or valuable.
01:07:13
Speaker
And if you don't know that and understand that and you don't believe that they are, there's nothing you can do. There's no program you can have. There's no practice you can tell me about that's going to work because that's in your heart.
01:07:27
Speaker
So there has to be some serious active engagement around trying to grapple with that if that's something that you're carrying. Mm-hmm.
01:07:38
Speaker
I really love that you talk about mindset and earlier you were talking about parents and when y'all tried to introduce the concept of restorative justice to parents,
01:07:50
Speaker
it was not in alignment with what they felt like they could offer. And what it made me think of was this new term, gentle parenting. And I remember when I seen it, I was like, gentle parenting, you know a part of me was triggered. I got two godchildren.
01:08:04
Speaker
But I can recognize now and before this moment that the part of me was triggered, was feeling like that I had to give something that i never received. And a huge part of the conversation with gentle parenting and restorative justice is this concept that it's privilege. you know To be a gentle parent, you have to be a privileged parent.
01:08:24
Speaker
And I almost feel that with restorative justice, I've definitely introduced some models and particularly to Black parents. after you know there has been harm done to children. And they have definitely looked at me like, so you're going to suspend somebody?
01:08:39
Speaker
like i love the sister circle you're trying to do and the meditation, but you're going to suspend somebody. But at the end of the day. Right. So it makes me think of this concept around privilege right and around access and how much I think even we have bought into this idea that to be gentle, you have to be privileged.
01:09:00
Speaker
But I'm wondering if you can speak to that because you're a parent, because you've, you know, really have engaged in this model of restorative justice. And I feel like the parent version is like gentle parenting. i feel like it's kind of the same language.
01:09:15
Speaker
But I'm wondering what can you offer to educators who are parents and or just parents who feel like that's too much work or feel like that's extra.
01:09:26
Speaker
I think that's also what we hear around restorative justice with teachers. They say, well, that's more work for me. And I'm wondering if there's a reframe that we can have collectively around our mindset. Yeah. Yeah.
01:09:39
Speaker
I haven't heard of this thing called gentle parenting, but I feel like when my kids were in preschool, there were so many resources for parents. The school preschools were always having like workshops about different kinds of parenting and, you know, because the little people, they are they're just doing their own thing and we' we're trying to figure out what's going on. We're just like, wait, what's going on right now? Can somebody- Kenji is nodding his hands so hard right now.
01:10:04
Speaker
the early the To me, early childhood educators are the truth. They think about human development. They think about child development. They can explain some things that you don't really understand are happening. Like, why is that little person on the floor screaming and flailing their arms all over the place? I just don't know what's happening.
01:10:20
Speaker
But, um oh, there's so many things in what you said. Let me go back. So I was not spanked as a child. And that was an active decision by my parents who grew up with corporal punishment. And they were deciding that that was not going to be what they did and trying to kind of rethink this thing that we call punishment and also rethink and reimagine what that means for Black people and try to disentangle our lives and our stories from the story of, you know, when was your first whooping and how hard was it and what'd you get hit with and all this kind of stuff, like just being active about that. So I am admittedly one of those people when the black comedians are going on and on about you getting your butt whooped, I'm just, I can't relate. And I also get a little bit like, i don't know if we have to put this out there. Like, I don't know if this is, this doesn't have to be the way.
01:11:09
Speaker
I also think about the times as a mother when I'm least restorative, as when I'm exhausted, it's when there's some other kind of stressors, There's something going on And so what I feel like I understand is to react restoratively, you have to have so many parts of your body and your mind turned on into that moment with your child. and I had so much clarity about doing that when I was a teacher. Like, i've got okay, turn it on, like everything in your body, turn it on right now. I've got the student who's just going off.
01:11:46
Speaker
I just got called a bitch. Turn it on, find wherever it is, find this thing and get yourself grounded and you're going to be okay. You have nothing to lose if you just turn everything on and try to be present in this moment and not react and fall out. Right?
01:12:03
Speaker
So i also understand how people can get away from wanting to think and act restoratively. It's hard. It's a constant thing. Some ways that I see it showing up and one of the things that I taught my children really early on is just for them to be able to ask the question, what can I do to make it right? So we try not to be an apology household, like saying sorry is kind of sorry. Like what does that do?
01:12:27
Speaker
But you can ask, a child very young can ask what can they do to make it right? And guess what? A parent can too. I think the part that's hard is parents, like teachers, think there's a particular role for them. yes And don't want to really veer off from that role.
01:12:40
Speaker
And to come down off your high horse and say to your child, you know, I really shouldn't have yelled. I don't even like that I yelled. Like, no, I'm mad. I'm even more mad because I yelled and I feel icky because i shouldn't have yelled at you and I don't like it. And i can I take it back?
01:12:56
Speaker
And actually children are able to engage that with you. And the great thing about them is they actually forgive you whether you deserve or not.
01:13:06
Speaker
and But the fact that you give them that power to be in that conversation and for you to name when you have done something that you're not proud of, the humility that's involved in that is serious, but it's also so gratifying and it's so powerful. And you see your children just kind of rise in a certain level of confidence and also having clarity about how they want to be treated, not just by you, but when they're not with you.
01:13:34
Speaker
They have a sense of justice and equity in their own bodies that they can name and they can talk about that when they're not right under you. And I think that's really important.
01:13:44
Speaker
I'm so appreciative of that response and for the question to Jewel around its relationship to gentle parenting and the feeling that that is for other people's children or for other communities. And there's the reality that we deal with all the time as black people.
01:14:01
Speaker
that the world is not interested in restoring us, at least not for our own sake. It'll bring you back from the dead to do some more work for it, but it's not interested in helping you be holistic.
01:14:11
Speaker
And so I think a lot of the, whether it's corporal punishment tied to this idea of protection, right? I'd rather beat you than you get killed. That was said to me directly. remember one of my first experiences in school was being beat by ironically the principal, Dr. David Just. I mean, this goes into- He's saying names.
01:14:30
Speaker
Okay. That's name. yeah dr david just at riverside bethel christian my mom watched him had to be the witness to those corporal punishments because the goal was for me not to be put out of school right and i would say to and i argue it worked look at me right thank goodness for that that's the story the mythology that is presented to us going all the way back right to the original people who figured out if they like we've talked about in previous conversations in this podcast if they fawn
01:15:01
Speaker
right? If they find a way to go along, to get along, that they'll be okay. And how do you train young people who come here with spirit full, body full to go along, get along? My daughter is two.
01:15:13
Speaker
There's going to be, have to be some fear and some fear mongering put into that person to get them to do that for other people. And so I guess I'm just thinking about, i'm thinking about a whole lot of things, but I'm wondering about this idea that we get from Dr. Amber McZill that trauma that has not been metabolized will become a part of our personality, yeah trauma that hasn't been really given to the earth, digested, shifted, or metabolized in our bodies, collective trauma will become a part of our culture. And I'm wondering if you can tell us a bit about what are some practices that we can engage as parents,
01:15:55
Speaker
caretakers of young people to restore, do that work that you're talking about, to be restored, to be fully in ourselves so that we can show up fully in ourselves for our young people that we are entrusted in care. How do we metabolize this trauma? I love how you put that, Kenjess. I love the way you're using metabolize.
01:16:16
Speaker
Oh, wow. So one, I think sort of our language and our approach to things. I think language is so important in the way that we're talking and even as we're hearing ourselves. I wrote a little piece about this injustice on both sides, just how like even with children, you may be somewhere, your kid's climbing on something, you know what can happen. They can fall, they can hurt themselves and you just get so upset. And then when they do actually fall and hurt themselves, but you told them like 12 times not to do whatever they were doing, the first thing we say is,
01:16:48
Speaker
didn't tell you didn't I tell you not to do that? And it's not, are you OK? Did you get hurt? What can I do? So something that my husband and I started doing early on was trying to ask that question. And my husband, he talks about this publicly, so I'm not saying anything that he wouldn't say.
01:17:06
Speaker
That was so hard for him because he was like, didn't I tell you? like He does restorative justice. He believes in restorative justice, but his mind could not wrap around like I told you 10 times not to do that. And now you're hurt.
01:17:19
Speaker
Now it's like you're crying and it's you know a big problem. And so i always think about that. And I think about also just because of our work and because my husband and i as professors, as running this research center, as being engaged in this work, we hold space for so many people.
01:17:38
Speaker
and early on when we had to start sheltering in place, I said, o I just think like we better find somebody to hold space for us. And so I started looking for a family therapist and I told my husband I wanted to do this. He was totally all in. I said, we're holding space. We're doing all this stuff and we feel like we have the capacity to to do it.
01:18:01
Speaker
And we don't even feel like anything's particularly wrong. But I was like, this is going to be a lot. And I just want, want some support. I want some guidance. Where is the guide for the guide? Where is the facilitator?
01:18:14
Speaker
My husband did his MDiv at Princeton and he has a colleague, Greg Ellison at Emory University who all his research is on pastoral care. So like pastors who are doing all this stuff and stretched thin for their congregations, like, are they going to therapy? Are they, you know, involved in caring for themselves so that this stuff doesn't manifest in other ways, right?
01:18:35
Speaker
So I went on this journey looking for, one, a Black therapist. Two, when I started looking, so many people in the field have based their work around trauma or trauma-informed care.
01:18:52
Speaker
And i realized when I was looking for this therapist for our family that I was uncomfortable with trauma. people who had positioned themselves as being trauma informed because there was a part of me that kind of felt like it was deficit oriented.
01:19:08
Speaker
Because what I wanted, Kenjis, was what you were talking about. I wanted wellness. I wanted us to be able to metabolize everything that was happening. i didn't even know what was about to happen that summer, but I was just already just saying, this is going to be a lot and I don't know what's going to happen. And I don't even want to know what's going to happen without having somebody with us while we're feeling okay.
01:19:33
Speaker
get us started while we're feeling good. And boy, did we really need and appreciate and love having this Black woman therapist who actually situated her work in overall wellness, who talked about ancestral work and ancestral care. So to me, there were so many things that she was doing. One,
01:19:53
Speaker
She was talking about your whole wellness. She was connecting it to wellness to Black culture and ancestral work. She was about many modes of wellness.
01:20:03
Speaker
And I just thought about how powerful that was for me that she could sort of see beyond positioning herself as responding or helping you respond to trauma that she actually believed and was invested in, feeling like we also were well and wanting to keep ourselves well.
01:20:21
Speaker
And that we just wanted to be able to do what you were saying, Ken, just to metabolize some of these things. And I know that there are other people who do better work and it's not my area, but around, you know, black people engaging in therapy. I think there's more conversations about that. Certainly after the last couple of years, there's more conversations about that. But I think those of us who hold space for others and do this kind of work, you never know how it's weighing on you and don't wait, like don't wait until...
01:20:47
Speaker
the thing feels too heavy. What does it mean to say, i would like a guy to help me get through this right now. And to, as my older son called her, the feelings doctor, I'm to talk to the feelings doctor today.
01:20:58
Speaker
You know, really thought that that was amazing. Like, we just talk about feelings like this. This is great, you know, and just introducing them to that process early on might need it later. And they know that there are these feelings doctors or people who can like process things with you and talk with you.
01:21:14
Speaker
I think this is a really interesting, conversation around from gentle parenting to restorative and transformative justice and families in how we think about what we're worthy of. So let's talk about us and what we feel we're worthy of and deserving of.
01:21:31
Speaker
And one of my dear Maori colleagues from New Zealand, his name is Matua Ra, he came to our center and gave this beautiful talk. And he said that he was rejecting the language around intergenerational trauma that much like people of African descent here, they were using that terminology a lot for Maori folks in New Zealand.
01:21:51
Speaker
And he said, this is not intergenerational trauma. This is colonial trauma. Like I'm not going to allow my people, my family, my children broad shoulder this trauma, it does it come from us?
01:22:04
Speaker
And Jenwright, I think has this beautiful piece around healing centered engagement where he says, you know maybe what we've missed in this focus on trauma informed practice is we've missed the fact that sometimes our young people are receiving this message that I am the worst thing that ever happened to me.
01:22:22
Speaker
My family, my community is the worst thing that happened to me. Like everything is located in me and my identity. And how in his own work, he wanted to get away from that. And he started talking about this healing centered work and trying to just change that language and the approach from it's not because of you, we're not trying to change you, but it's all these other things that are deeply problematic.
01:22:46
Speaker
And Kenjus, one other thing that you said that I was thinking about the Ta-Nehisi Coates book and you know when he talked about just corporal punishment in his family and even with his son and, you know, how that was, I thought he just gave really powerful words around the fear and how so much of the corporal punishment really emerges from our fear of what happens when our children are out there, without us and somebody's judging them and we know the terror that people can wreak on our children. And so we're trying to, so busy trying to keep them in line, thinking that that might help keep them safe and protected out there and how he had to really actively
01:23:25
Speaker
push back on that and how hard it is, right? How hard it is because of expectations from our families, from us feeling judged about our parenting styles and what we're doing. But I think if more of us are connected and trying to think about this together as a collective,
01:23:42
Speaker
I think we need more conversations about this, to be honest with you, just parent groups. I had a wonderful session with other Black mothers in January where we talked about this. We talked about what was so-called discipline in our own households. One of my questions was, what did discipline look like in your household and how...
01:24:00
Speaker
Does discipline in your household as a parent, how does it converge and diverge with how you experience it as a child? And just processing that was powerful. And so many of these mothers were doing this thing that we're talking about. They were really wanting to not show up in punitive ways for their children and create more space for them to talk.
01:24:20
Speaker
and figure out who their kids really are. Like one of the mothers was talking about, you know, being one of five kids and sometimes the parents just said, oh, been there, done that. We already, we know what kids need. Cause you know, we've done this five times, you know, instead of saying, actually you need something different. That's not actually working for you. You you need a different response approach. And just, I think having the spaces for parents to process black parents um is so powerful.
01:24:48
Speaker
You shared a lot earlier about what I heard, I should say, is in order to do this work, in order to engage restorative justice, there's a need for capacity.
01:25:04
Speaker
And for me, I was hearing like rest and also like people who are well, who have the practice of becoming healthier and healthier and healthier.
01:25:17
Speaker
and And I remember Jewel, I think there's some resentment for people around being asked to incorporate a framework that they never received. And I'm thinking about that around for teachers, particularly in like, you know, restorative justice is really helpful in thinking about how it's been named anyway and thinking about the harm that has been imposed upon children.
01:25:37
Speaker
When we think about schools, especially right now, I think it's also important to acknowledge the harm that teachers and educators yeah are experiencing. in them and the need Yeah, and the need for their wellness and their rest and there for them to have capacity to actually engage these really important practices and frameworks.
01:26:01
Speaker
And, Maisha, you share the newest tenet in your framework is that futures matter. I'm hoping that you can close us out in thinking about what we've engaged today, what we've discussed, and help us to understand how we should be thinking about, because when I think about RJ and schools personally, and you shared this a little bit earlier, it's like schools as they exist, RJ actually transforms schools. Like you can't do both simultaneously. you can't do schooling and then
01:26:34
Speaker
really center and practice the principles of restorative justice. I'm hoping that you can close us out in thinking about both the future of your work, as well as for us to have futures in this work, sustainable futures.
01:26:51
Speaker
What do you want to leave us with and what we need to ground ourselves in and meditate on as we move forward in attempting to ensure the wellbeing of everyone? Absolutely. Thank you so much, Tiffany Marie, for that and inviting me to engage that.
01:27:07
Speaker
I talk a lot about restorative justice being for the grownups in the building. It's not just something that we should be thinking about doing to kids or creating this for the kids, but We need it. The grown people need it. And we need opportunities, um as Ken just said, to metabolize all the things that are coming you know from different directions. you know I was an elementary school teacher. i got out of elementary school teaching when they were getting ready to do this sort of canned curriculum that I was like, no, I i don't think I can do that.
01:27:37
Speaker
And then I moved to secondary and loved my time teaching high school. But some of the things that are in the pipeline now were not even happening then. And It was already feeling hard, like your artistry and your creativity sometimes are being choked out of you because there's just so many other things, so much minutia that you're thinking about. So for me, the restorative justice work, it is the fundamental premise of restorative justice is to really think about how we cultivate a sense of purpose and belonging for people in the community.
01:28:11
Speaker
And that's not just for children. The purpose and belonging has to be for the educators, for the staff, for the administrators. A lot of times teachers feel harmed by administrators. Sometimes administrators feel harmed by their teaching teams.
01:28:25
Speaker
You know, there's a lot of harm being thrown around and people feeling it from all different directions. So one of the things that I think in terms of futures matter is, Educators need opportunities to think about the educator they want to be 10, 15, 20 years from now. How do they want to be known?
01:28:42
Speaker
I talk to educators about what are the key words you want to be used when someone is describing their experience with you. And then not just stopping there. I love my dear colleague, Rich Milner has a book called Start Where You Are But Don't Stay There.
01:28:55
Speaker
And you know i often implement the start where you are, but don't stay there projects into my workshops where, okay, you imagine where you wanna but then we need to go back and map out a plan for how to get there. So what are some of these very specific things that you need to become this educator you wanna be, become the person who you want and need to be for children? what do you need to do for yourself?
01:29:19
Speaker
What do you need to do professionally? Is it reading something? Is it having some kind of immersive experience? Is it traveling somewhere? What is it? And then how do we create an action plan? I talk about action plans to actually become this person who you want to be. Because, you know, in teacher ed programs, we always have teaching philosophy statements. And we have people do these teaching philosophy statements. I mean, this has been happening forever.
01:29:41
Speaker
But you can have a philosophy that looks very different from your practice because embodying whatever this philosophy is can be very difficult. So the futures matter stance has to apply to the adults in the building.
01:29:53
Speaker
The futures matters stance is also just taking us back to why are we even here? Why is it that we're doing what we're doing? Why do we choose this space? And we have to be invested in multiple paths forward for our young people.
01:30:07
Speaker
All of this work is so that the children actually have a chance and opportunity at a future. any kind of future. And I say futures because, you know, that can look really different to lots of people, but we should not be closing off imaginations and creativity that help people think about what a future can be, or even thinking a future is possible. So i think the work is on both sides, right? Back to justice on both sides. It's for the grownups who need this work with each other. And I always say, let's be here with each other. Let's do the work we need to do with each other before we even think about
01:30:41
Speaker
trying to do this work with our children. We need it. And I guess we could say that same work for our parents, right? Like just the adults, I think, deserve spaces to process their lived experiences, the tensions that they live with and the work that they do, this great responsibility of you know, facilitating and guiding young people. That's that's a lot.
01:31:05
Speaker
It's a lot. Where are all of our spaces to do that? And that's why I love like people's education movement and Teachers for Social Justice, Black Teacher Network.
01:31:16
Speaker
There's so many of these organizations now that have support structures for educators who are like-minded and really want to do this work, but also know they can't do it by themselves and that they also need to keep their own wellness intact.
01:31:31
Speaker
oh Let the community say, say. ah say Thank you for that word. So good. Good word. Y'all heard it here from the one and only Myisha T. Thank you so much.
01:31:48
Speaker
Goodness gracious.
01:31:58
Speaker
I'm left with so many questions after today's episode, namely thinking about the type of society we have created. Like, what does it mean when babies can go to school in the morning and because of decisions that we have made as educators end up in jail that evening?
01:32:20
Speaker
I'm wondering about the types of interventions necessary for us to embody radical courage, stand up and say no to the types of practices within schools that consent ultimately support the criminalization of our children, namely our little black girls and boys. What are the types of workshops and training that disrupt anti-blackness, that disrupt the carceral logics and mentalities that maintain these practices.
01:32:58
Speaker
I believe it starts with us. It starts and ends with us as adults to unlearn, to let go of all of our beliefs and tactics around ownership and what is owed to us and what young people in their bodies should be doing while with us.
01:33:15
Speaker
We have to engage and a type of critical imagination around what it looks like
01:33:40
Speaker
Thank you for listening to this episode of Drawing From The Well, brought to you by the Youth Wellness Movement. I'm your host, Tiffany Marie. This podcast is co-produced by yours truly and John Reyes, with music by my boy Jansen V. Drawing From The Well is supported by Community Responsive Education.
01:34:01
Speaker
Continue the conversation youthwellness.com.
01:43:32
Speaker
Thank you.