 What I want to argue today really for you is that a meaningful purpose for education has been lost. I think that a restorative approach based on asking the who of education could repurpose schooling for human flourishing. I'll let you do the slides if you want. Thank you. Thousands of third and sixth graders recently sat as they do every year in my home province of Ontario to write for two weeks standardized tests in writing, reading, and arithmetic. My colleague Joel Westheimer has termed these the tests that ate humanity. He cites the Ottawa school breakfast program, which feeds 8,000 school children each morning at Canada's capital as just one example. Because on their website they post the question, why is it important to feed children who are hungry? Now the fact that this question even needs to be asked is very troubling, but I think the answer is even more so. Quote, children who receive a healthy, nutritious head start to the day show a marked improvement in academic achievement. So in other words, we must feed children for performance and not simply because they don't have enough to eat. In this age of measurement, education has really become about attaining skills for individual success in a global economy. Education is for students to get it, to comprehend it, to be tested on it. Even if she didn't want to get it, doesn't like it, doesn't enjoy it, and doesn't intend to use it. This is what Gert Biesta refers to as the learnification of education. And he encourages educators to think about the purpose of our drive for outcomes and practices. Asking, what is education for? Who is it for? And it's this latter question that I think must be the priority for education. The who has to come before the what. The relationships at stake must determine the content. A restorative approach, as everyone has already noted this morning and Fania has powerfully illustrated, demands attention to our relationality and to the protection of positive conditions that allow us to thrive. Restorative justice educators have been extremely successful in asking, who is harmed by zero-tolerance policies? They've demonstrated that it's the most marginalized youth who are suspended and expelled. In so doing, there has been a movement of change. In Canada, many school boards have rejected such policies, and they are often replaced with policies that engage learners in developing the values by which they will all live in a school community. This is a fundamental lesson in democratic citizenship, but strangely, it has not carried over to our social studies curricula. Social studies, what we group as history, geography, and civics or citizenship education, are meant to teach young people the knowledge, skills, and values to further the public good. That is what those courses are for. Who is harmed when the very fact of relationship is missing from social studies education across Canada? Of course, I think all of us are, but I want to give two examples in the brief time that I have. One, it is young girls who are isolated from politics. As Madeline Arnaud has noted in Britain and my own work shows in Canada, civics courses prize the very rational and responsible citizen. The example here from the BC civics studies, grade 11, manages to squeeze in about five or six references to responsibility in a very short paragraph about its outcomes. These are characteristics that are strongly associated with masculine objectivity and detachment. The affective domain, which we stereotypically associate with feminine sociability and motionality, remains relatively insignificant in social studies. Schools address major concepts like capitalism and patriarchy, which we know represent men as rulers, but rarely is the notion of patriarchy addressed. Furthermore, when there is even any mention of relationships, which is hard to find, they are confined to family issues at the very lowest grade levels and are almost non-existent by high school. They are replaced rather than associated with concepts of government and economy. And despite Nova Scotia being a leadership for a restorative approach, its own social studies framework, like many of the other provinces, makes citizenship a personal abstract endeavor, requiring, quote, that individuals first know who they are, that they have a sense of identity, and that they know where they fit in the scheme of things, end quote. What would it mean for youth political engagement, and particularly women in politics, if emotional connectedness was an imperative for schools? I think this is an imperative for any commitment to social change across all genders. We need to be teaching this. What if we did forefront that in the curricula? We need a restorative approach to civics that moves away from individual skills and towards interactive aspects, the range of public and private relationships that are essential to humanity. And allow me to give you one other example. Again, I ask who is harmed when the very fact of relationship is missing from social studies education? It is indigenous youth who are excluded from our nation's history. As Cree educator Dwayne Donald reminds us of our history curricula, quote, the TPs and costumes approach leaves teachers and students with the unfortunate impression that Indians have not done much since the buffalo were killed off, and the West was settled, end quote. And we know that school history has a direct impact on our social consciousness, our awareness, and then what as a society we value and will act upon. We only have to consider the millions of dollars that our former Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently spent in 2015 to mark the 200th birthday of Canada's first recognized Prime Minister Sir John A. McDonald. And at the bottom here, sorry, slide before, is some of the bobblehead dolls that were actually distributed to young children to play with. So this happened, this 200th celebration happened, the same year that the Truth and Reconciliation Report on Indian Residential Schools was released. And Harper was calling McDonald, quote, a shining example of modesty hope and success, without mentioning his authorship of residential schools and his desire as historian Tim Stanley notes to see Canada as an Aryan nation. What would it mean for reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples if we rejected, if we actively rejected this denial of historic social and curricular relationality? We need a restorative approach to history education that moves away from the white grand narrative and towards colonialism as a shared condition, which is essential for any type of partnership of nations. Now, what this looks like in classrooms is very hard to articulate, perhaps even harder to articulate than circles in conferencing, which I know is very hard for many of you in this room to define for those who are obsessed with accountability measures. But I want to give you a concrete example that I'm very excited about. I'll go on to the last slide. Thank you. In this province, African Nova Scotian youth have inherited violence that might, as John Paul Letterac argues, quote, best be understood as the disruption and far too often outright destruction of a people's story. The stories of African Nova Scotians and institutionalized racism must be told in our schools to challenge white privilege and reproduction of racial and interrelated class inequality. Part of that story is the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children, which opened in 1921 as a welfare institution for black children who were segregated from white-only religious orphanages and industrial schools. As many of you know, a government-sponsored restorative inquiry was recently launched. I am proud to say that in partnership with the inquiry and the survivors of the home, a community of scholars and educators, myself included, have created the Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation Project. This project will create augmented reality oral histories with former residents to address exclusionary history as a barrier to educational equity and to build right relations between African Nova Scotians and non-African Nova Scotians. Dora is going to be using cutting-edge technology, the Oculus Rift, with 3D, 360-degree immersive visuals, also user-interactive capabilities, that will engage history students in this province with the personal storytelling of the former residents, and they will walk together in this virtual space through the landscape of the home as well as through race relations in this province. This project embraces a restorative approach to education. It supports dialogue with difficult knowledge to build ethical relationality among people. It approaches learning as communal interactions that seek justice across time, space, and generations. And it embraces pedagogy as a social relationship for inclusive, healthy learning communities. Such an approach I think will never succumb to the tests that continue to eat humanity. Rather, it will feed humanity for humanity's sake.