“Because, at the end of the day, it's their school:” Centering Student Voice in Restorative Practices

Abstract

This dissertation centers student voices in Restorative Practices (RP) through three interrelated papers. The first paper is a systematic review analyzing how RP is conceptualized, implemented, and evaluated in United States (U.S.) schools, highlighting inconsistency in conceptualizations and implementation of RP, and evaluation methods that often prioritize adult perspectives over student voices. Building off of these findings, the second paper presents a qualitative study centering student perspectives on their experiences with RP at an urban-emergent high school, using the Social Discipline Window as a framework. Findings reveal distinct experiences with student-teacher relationships and the need for an “Emergent Social Discipline Window” to more closely represent student experiences by accounting for harm. The third paper examines student-teacher collaboration in addressing classroom challenges through two interrelated studies. Specifically, Paper Three explores how a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) study with middle school students and their teacher identified classroom problems and brainstormed solutions, while also investigating the impact of combining YPAR with RP. Findings suggest that while the YPAR processes facilitated dialogue and some elements of problem-posing education, it did not foster critical consciousness or praxis, but incorporating RP encouraged respectful engagement and discussion, even on sensitive topics. Collectively, these dissertation manuscripts underscore the need for RP implementation that is more clearly defined, student-centered, and critically engaged with issues of power and systemic inequities. This dissertation calls for reimagining RP as a transformative framework that prioritizes student agency and structural change in K-12 schools.