Restorative Justice in the Classroom: Liberating Students’ Voices Through Relational Pedagogy

Crystena A. H. Parker-Shandal

Jan 2023 · Springer Nature

About this ebook

This book focuses on how teachers can transmit and practice values through classroom circles that attend to and empower all students’ voices. A growing number of teachers are using relational pedagogy, drawing on Indigenous circle practice, as a pedagogical tool. Done well, circles can build and sustain dialogue and peaceful relations. Done poorly, circles reflect and reinforce relations of power, which, if disregarded, can be damaging for participants whose voices are silenced or not sufficiently heard. Parker-Shandal’s consideration of teachers’ professional learning and training in restorative justice in education focuses on ethnographic, classroom-based research in diverse urban elementary schools. Her data include observations of classrooms, teacher surveys, and interviews with students, teachers, and principals. The book provides a detailed account of the lived experience of students and teachers as they engage with and experience the transformative power of constructive dialogueabout conflicts embedded in curriculum subject matter through restorative justice pedagogies.

About the author

Crystena A. H. Parker-Shandal is Associate Professor of Social Development Studies at Renison University College at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Her research on peacebuilding education in diverse multicultural classrooms with marginalized children shows how dialogic pedagogies facilitate inclusive spaces where all students have the opportunity to participate and have their voices heard. She is the author Peacebuilding, Citizenship, and Identity: Empowering Conflict and Dialogue in Multicultural Classrooms (2015) and co-editor of Finding Refuge In Canada (2021).