Justice on Both Sides: Transforming Education Through Restorative Justice

Restorative justice represents "a paradigm shift in the way Americans conceptualize and administer punishment," says author Maisha T. Winn, from a focus on crime to a focus on harm, including the needs of both those who were harmed and those who caused it. Her book, Justice on Both Sides, provides an urgently needed, comprehensive account of the value of restorative justice and how contemporary schools can implement effective practices to address inequalities associated with race, class, and gender.

Winn, a restorative justice practitioner and scholar, draws on her extensive experience as a coach to school leaders and teachers to show how indispensable restorative justice is in understanding and addressing the educational needs of students, particularly disadvantaged youth. Justice on Both Sides makes a major contribution by demonstrating how this actually works in schools and how it can be integrated into a range of educational settings. It also emphasizes how language and labeling must be addressed in any fruitful restorative effort. Ultimately, Winn makes the case for restorative justice as a crucial answer, at least in part, to the unequal practices and opportunities in American schools.


About the Author
Maisha T. Winn is the Chancellor's Leadership Professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Davis, where she also co-directs (with Torry Winn) the Transformative Justice in Education (TJE) Center. Winn's program of research examines the relationships between language, literacy, justice, and school policies. She began her career in education as an elementary school teacher and eventually a high school English teacher. In 2012 she received the American Educational Research Association Early Career Award and in 2016 was named an American Educational Research Association Fellow. As a 2014 William T. Grant Distinguished Fellow, Winn shadowed restorative justice attorneys and practitioners in the West and Midwest. She is the author of several books, including Writing in Rhythm: Spoken Word Poetry in Urban Schools (published under her maiden name, "Fisher"); Black Literate Lives: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (published under "Fisher"); Writing Instruction in the Culturally Relevant Classroom (with Latrise P. Johnson); and Girl Time: Literacy, Justice, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline; and coeditor of Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Research (with Django Paris). She is also the author of numerous articles in journals such as Review of Research in Education; Anthropology and Education Quarterly; International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education; Race, Ethnicity and Education; Research in the Teaching of English; Race and Social Problems; and Harvard Educational Review.