 So I'm going to invite each and every one of you to be a restorative justice theorist and a restorative justice practitioner. Sometimes we separate them. These are our theory people, and these are our researchers, and these are our practitioners. We're all researchers finding a new way forward. We're all theorists, and we are all practitioners. So I want you to think about critically what's your theory of restorative justice? Do you first say we focus on the harm done? Do you focus on relationships? What's your elevator pitch? What is your elevator pitch for restorative justice? How are you defining it? How are you showing up in the world about this idea of restorative justice? So if each and every one of us is all of that, researcher, theorist, practitioner, I think my job in tertiary education is to be all of that, and most importantly, to lay the groundwork for the students to be the practitioners that come behind me, and for me to get out of my ivory tower and into my community. So really think about what we're learning together and how we're learning together. I'm gonna tell you two stories. I'm gonna wave in a little bit of theory because I've had the great privilege to learn from some of the bigger, formal theorists in the world. And then it sort of invites you on a little bit of my journey, and it also helps me know what I need to do as an educator in tertiary education. So I started my work in Canberra, Australia, and I was invited to participate and observe as the expert, a restorative justice conference. At this time in Canberra, this particular case was diverted to police, and it was a police officer that was facilitating the case. And this young man had vandalized a school and invited to this particular conference where his parents, the school principal, the teacher, and his grandmother. And we all turned up and we were listening to this young man. And he was like not impressed at all. And his sort of posturing was like this. He was sort of proud that he vandalized the school. And as the police officer wagged his finger at him, he was still proud. And as the principal wagged his finger at him, he was even prouder. And as the teacher whose classroom was vandalized, wagged his finger at him, he was even prouder. And then his parents were feeling so much shame that they didn't know what to say. And it wasn't until his grandmother spoke that everything shifted. Because the grandmother, who had always been there for Johnny, she didn't go to Bingo anymore. And Bingo was where she hung out with her friends. She looked forward to it every week. And so she wasn't going to Bingo anymore. And even though Johnny was mad at the school, he didn't never expected it, his behavior to affect his grandmother. And so that's when everything shifted in the room. There was that emotional contagion of what went wrong. And that's when everyone started stepping up. So it sounded like it was pretty good. Like he got the emotional shift, things were moving, he got it, that he had caused harm to the school. But what was never addressed in that first conference that I observed more than 15 years ago was why he was mad at the school. We never addressed that issue at all. But he was now compliant with the school rules, he acknowledged the harm done to the school, but we never worked on why he was mad at the school. And so one of my teachers was John Brathwaite. And he always couples respiratory justice with responsive regulation. And that's sort of marrying the change that we want at the individual level with the change that we want at the institutional level. Change has to happen hand in hand. If we rely on individual change case by case, we're never gonna get there. So responsive regulation means disaggregating the data. Who's excluding? Who are we excluding? Who are we not? Race makes a big difference. We have to change the pedagogy of how we keep kids in schools and the knowledges that we bring into schools. We have to welcome indigenous knowledges. In Canada, it's our indigenous people who are systematically pushed out of school and into our criminal justice system. It's an embarrassment for all of us. It shouldn't happen. So we need to look at, to be a responsive institution, we need to look at our data and bring in different knowledges. There's many reasons why kids are systematically pushed out of school. And if we just rely on individual change, we're not gonna get there. The change has to be at a systemic level as well and institutions have to start stepping up to that challenge. So the other, one of my other teachers was Val Brathwaite and she talks about motivational postures. So we are often the context of restorative justice and we default to interpersonal relationships. That's what we're marrying. We're sort of reconciling and repairing the harm done at an interpersonal level. And so that's repairing horizontal relationships. But we also have relationships with institutions and I call those vertical relationships. And so we need to start thinking about our relationships with institutions and how we're working on that level of relationship. So Val has an analogy, it's a high jump sort of analogy. And some of our kids, and our challenge in schools is to keep raising the bar. Primary, secondary, tertiary, we're always raising the bar because we want them to keep clearing the bar. And some of our kids, we equip really well to clear that bar every year. The next sort of group of kids are sort of capitulated. We raise the bar and sometimes we get there and we clear the bar and sometimes we don't. But we keep trying because we want to be good citizens. We want to be good actors in the school and we want that to happen. There's another group of kids and their job, similar to the young boy that I was just talking about, they see the bar and because the school has never really done the right thing to them, their job is to knock down their stupid bar every single time because the institution hasn't really turned up for them in a good way. So their job is to knock down the bar. The next group of kids, the disengagers, the school put out the bar and they don't even care about the bar anymore. They're walking out the back door. So we have to raise the bar for all of us and give the kids in schools all the resources they need to clear the bar. So they're not walking out the back door. So they're turning up in a good way. So the responsibility is reciprocal and our institutions, it's at the institutional level the biggest challenges. We have to change the way our institutions are stepping up for our kids and can't expect all the change at the individual level. Oh my goodness, okay, I'm gonna tell you one last story. So, and part of it is just turning up in our communities. So there was, and this sort of relates to what you focus on. Do you focus on the harm done or not? So there was one day in my life and I started getting a lot of calls because there was a terrible incident in the school that's sort of in my own backyard and people were phoning me not because I was the expert but this was my community. This is my community and I was a fellow parent at the school. And so they started phoning me and because there was a young girl that had been allegedly bullied in school and she wasn't having very good time and so she self selected to just go up to the principal's room and have a little time out. But there was no one there so she phoned her parents, said it's happened again and this particular parent reached the tipping point and she turned up at the school with two of her two other children and they basically barricaded the classroom and verbally rampaged the entire classroom. Teachers, kids, there was kids under the desk, the teacher was in tears and by the end of the day the mother had a restraining order against her and the story was fracturing across the community. And everyone's phoning me and what I did notice is that every time I picked up the phone people had different stories and the story of what happened that day was coalescing around different parent groups and I thought, oh my gosh, this is just crazy and everyone's going, you gotta do something and teachers or parents were saying, wanting demands from the institution, from the school but the school couldn't speak on behalf of anybody that day. They couldn't because of privacy concerns and a number of different concerns, the school couldn't do anything because they had responsibilities and there's privacy to be aware of. So what happened in the end was that we can only speak for ourselves and so we invited every parent that was in that, I'm very sorry, every parent, every parent that was in that particular classroom we just invited them to voluntarily show up and they did, including the father and I didn't know if I had a safe space anymore and I couldn't focus on repairing the home done I had to throw all that training about pre-meetings and what, out of the door but I wanted, we needed to have the conversation because it was fracturing the community and so we all, I only said, I can't repair the home done but the only thing I can do is bring us to a common story. That's the only thing I can do today. The only thing I can do in a good way is to have a common story so our community isn't fracturing anymore but remarkably, one very brave member of our community reached out to the parents. I live on your own, your same street and I feel, I know what's happening to your family and I've never reached out to you and so the father that was in the circle of the school went home, told the mother what to do, the mother walked down the hall or walked down the street to the other mother's house they had a heart to heart she voluntarily wrote a letter of apology to the entire school the next day and most importantly, there too, it was like, this was like three days before the school was closing for the summer. Those two young girls that lived on the same street played all summer long. They had new friends and we weren't focusing on repairing the home done but it was done. We just wanted a common story to share so we could feel pride in our community again. So that's it, I'm way over, I'm very apologizing. So just greetings from the art, one of my teachings from the Coast Salish people is, sorry, drop to hold each other up so I hope we do so, thanks so much.