Cultivating just campus communities: engaging university students in developing restorative justice alternatives

ABSTRACT

This case study considers how engaging university students in developing restorative alternatives to traditional retributive student conduct processes impact their attitudes toward restorative justice both on campus and beyond. As opposed to punitive approaches, Restorative Justice (RJ) attempts to achieve justice by addressing the harm caused by conduct violations through reconcillation between the stakeholders. While some universities have advanced RJ alternatives to address on-campus wrongdoing, little research exists on the impact of including university students in developing such models. As an alternative to a top-down administration-center approach, this case study utilized just community and justice-learning frameworks to develop a short course that engaged university students in developing on-campus RJ alternatives and measure the impact of the course on the students’ attitudes related to RJ through a pre-and post-course assessment based on the Taylor & Bailey’s Restorative Justice Attitudes Scale as well as student comments. This paper outlines the insights gained from the students’ post-course reflections on restorative practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Restorative justice
• just community
• justice-learning
• student conduct
• attitudes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported that there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.