4 research outputs found
Community Circles in Response to Restorative Justice Research and Critique
Zero-tolerance discipline in schools has resulted in disproportionate referrals, suspensions, and expulsions for Black students, students with disabilities, and low-income students of color. Restorative Justice (RJ) seeks to intervene in these patterns by emphasizing community interconnectedness and a discourse of harm, accountability, and repair. Although RJ has been shown to increase school connectedness and decrease suspensions and expulsions, teachers and students using RJ (as a response to discipline issues) report varying degrees of satisfaction with the framework. Frustrations can include limited time and limited depth of conversations with students who have caused harm, so that root causes of behavior are not addressed or explored. Ultimately, if there is no sense of community or accountability established prior to harmful interactions, there is no justice to be restored. Community circles (a practice of ritualized egalitarian discussion) can establish the interconnectedness needed for RJ to be effectively practiced in schools. This paper instructs teachers and school staff how to plan, run, and train students to facilitate community circles in their classrooms
Curricular Hauntings: Confrontations with Ghosts in Pursuit of a Place of Freedom
Drawing from theories of racial and historical hauntings (Derrida, 1993; Gordon; 1997), affect studies (Ahmed, 2014; Berlant, 2011; Coleman, 2021; Stewart, 2004), the spaciocurricular (Helfenbein, 2021) and theorizations of agential assemblages (Barad, 2007; Wozolek, 2021), this paper explores possibilities for recovering solidarities, collectivities, and freedoms through considerations of place, history, and poetry. In particular, this paper will examine readings of place and poetry as curricular and methodological tools that resists narrative closures and help us stay with the remains, the uncertainties, and what cannot be spoken–the stories that “cannot be passed on” (Morrison, 1987, p. 274). In doing so, I hope to follow the call of postqualitative research to “engage more fully with the materiality of language” (MacLure, 2013, p. 663) and the work of im/possibilities in language and literature education in orienting ourselves to more just futures, and to each other
“This Poem Which is Not Your Language:” Jewishness, Translation, and the Historical Philosophy of Adrienne Rich, 1968-1991
The long and prolific career of lesbian feminist poet Adrienne Rich has been evaluated by readers and critics for the significant stylistic shifts that accompanied Rich’s increasing political awareness, radicalism, and calls to action in both poetry and prose. Rich’s Jewish life, however, has been relatively understudied. This essay argues that Rich’s Jewish engagement played a critical part in developing her historical philosophy: one that rejects the universal while reaching beyond the particular, embraces an oppositional Jewish history while refusing Jewish suffering as proprietary, and demands a critical evaluation of the complicated inheritance of Holocaust memory and its role in assimilating Jewish life into mainstream U.S. national consciousness. Questions of history raised by Rich’s mid-career turn to her Jewishness—what I call her Jewish era, the 1980s— also bring to the surface the impossibility of her own desire to translate one historical moment into the next. In two parts, I examine how Rich’s Jewishness and translational experiments shaped a resistance poetics based in Jewish messianism, feminist critique, and queer embodiment to imagine new possibilities for reading and writing the past, present, and future
Questions at the Intersections of Critical Geography, Busing, and Racialized Student Discipline
This paper will explore questions, ideas, and ethical considerations for a future study I am imagining as an emerging scholar. Analyzed through a critical geography lens (Morrison, Annamma, & Jackson, 2017; Helfenbein, 2021), this narrative study will aim to understand how students at D High School tell stories and make meaning of experiences at the intersections of busing, race, class, and discipline. DHS is located in a wealthy, predominantly white neighborhood north of Atlanta, but nearly 45% of the student population are young People of Color who travel via district bus from low-income POC communities with high concentrations of immigrant families. Following national trends (Gregory, Skiba, & Noguera, 2010; Losen, Hodsen, Keith, Morrison, & Bellway, 2015; Riddle & Sinclair, 2019), the school’s publicly available discipline data indicates that students of Color are disproportionately involved in the school’s discipline systems. In addition, because many of the students who are bused (and who are engaged with the school discipline system) are Spanish speaking, I am curious how linguistic and cultural border-crossing may also be at play in their experiences. I am looking forward to feedback about bringing together racialized discipline policies and racialized geographies of education without a priori assumptions that they two are related, how to frame my research questions, and how to conduct this research ethically from my own positionality