Futures Matter: Creating Just Futures in This Age of Hyper-incarceration

ABSTRACT

What does it mean to teach and learn in this age of hyper-incarceration and the ongoing criminalization of multiply marginalized students and their families? And how can restorative justice be leveraged to initiate and sustain the important community-building and justice work needed in schools in the United States? In this article, the author revisits the four pedagogical stances she believes are foundational starting points for any educator seeking to shift existing paradigms and relational dynamics toward justice-based norms in classroom and school communities. These stances – History Matters, Race Matters, Justice Matters, and Language Matters – offer tangible ways to consider and approach the mindset that needs to underpin restorative justice practices in any context of education. The author also introduces a fifth stance, Futures Matter, which provides educators with a pathway for sustaining a restorative justice culture that creates purpose and belonging for a wide range of education stakeholders, including students and their families, staff, teachers, and administrators.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ In 2015 I spent a year with restorative justice attorneys and practitioners with support from the William T. Grant Distinguished Fellows Program.

² Here, I am building on Thomas (2019) notion of the “Dark Other,” which she argues is the spectacle in fantasy literature, associated with the pattern of the heroine’s appeal being based on overcoming the absence/presence of the “Dark Other.”

³ See, for example, the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights Civil Rights Data Collection https://ocrdata.ed.gov.

⁴ Jemison’s essay, “How long ‘til Black futures month” was published on her website http://nkjemisin.com/2013/09/how-long-til-black-future-month/ and inspired the title of her book.

⁵ For data on books by and about people of color and from First/Native Nations published for children and teens compiled by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison, see https://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/books/pcstats.asp.

⁶ This session, “Culture@Large: On Freedom and Radical Imagination: A Conversation with Robin D. G. Kelley,” featured Robin D. G. Kelley, Savannah Shange, John L. Jackson Jr, Gray Wilder, Orisanmi Burton (Chair), and John Collins (Chair).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maisha T. Winn

Maisha T. Winn is the Associate Dean and Chancellor’s Leadership Professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Davis where she co-founded and co-directs (with Dr Lawrence “Torry” Winn) the Transformative Justice in Education (TJE) Center.