Restorative Writing: Connecting Adjudicated Students to Local and Global Communities

Poets and memoirists have known for millennia that the written word can clarify, beautify and heal, as the students of Room 5C often discover. Writing, of course, is also a key tool of peaceful social change. As such, the written word can be where personal and social change, structure and agency, meet in the classroom. Yet how often is this power leveraged in our juvenile detention home schools? How often do we ask juvenile offenders to be critical participants, even leaders, in their communities? Freire would remind us that the problems juvenile offender-students face are themselves the best curriculum.

This presentation and workshop will equip participants with peace education curriculum that will empower student writers to find their voice as a first step towards taking action for global justice. In this way, personal and social change become quite connected. This curriculum challenges students to reflect on actions for social justice which they can pursue, as well as critically examine why disparities still exist.

Participants will be invited to take part in an example successful classroom activity and to engage in dialogue regarding some theoretical reasons for its success. Hence participants, especially any classroom teachers, will engage in reflective practice regarding their own classroom. The workshop will end with generating specific policy recommendations, based on the barriers to peace education that workshop participants currently observe. This dialogue can then facilitate the inclusion of peace education in every classroom.