School of Education Update
Seeking Justice in Education Faculty couple transforms the way communities think about education By Ashley Han
Husband and wife Lawrence (Torry) and Maisha Winn ’94 co-direct the Transformative Justice in Education Center (TJE) at UC Davis, which officially opened in September 2017 after a soft launch during the 2016-17 academic year. TJE brings the community and university together to stop racial inequalities in education and strengthen UC Davis’ efforts to create a cohesive, justice-seeking community. Maisha, the Chancellor’s Leadership Professor in the School of Education at UC Davis, has a rich background in the intersectionality of language, literacy and justice using critical participant ethnography methods. Torry, with over 15 years of experience in non-profit organizations, has worked with a variety of youth-serving institutions. His expertise includes race and equity, youth programs and education as well as community engagement and research. Together, the couple works with the School of Education to create and sustain a restorative culture in the teaching and learning spaces. The following is a conversation with the two visionaries and cofounders about restorative justice and transformative justice. According to Maisha, restorative justice is a paradigm shift from a punishment approach to harmful behavior to a consensus-building process. Transformative justice looks closely at the reasons why an incident occurred, which is often rooted in unhealthy relationships and social systems. This creates a responsibility for the individual, social structures and institutional policies to resolve and prevent reoccurrences of harmful incidents.
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Q: Do people have misconceptions or false narratives about restorative and transformative justice?
TW: They’re buzzwords. Some people
think restorative justice is an easy-fix program where you sit in circles and that’s it. They don’t understand that before you sit in circles to repair the harm, the whole community needs to come together to restore that culture. A program can be here today and gone tomorrow, but restorative justice lasts generations, with the responsibility falling on everyone to restore that culture.
MW: One of the biggest myths is that
when schools use restorative justice, children aren’t being held accountable. However, suspending and expelling children is not true accountability. I would argue when people say students are getting off too easy with restorative justice, then it is not being implemented in the correct way. To me, the highest form of accountability is when someone has to understand why they are harming others and engaging in inappropriate behaviors. Most adults don’t even know how to do that.