In higher education, the responsibility for submitting course assignments falls on the student. However, it can be difficult for adult learners—particularly students facing structural inequalities and disparities—to meet assignment deadlines. The conventional approach of removing points or not accepting late assignments assumes that students are disrespectful, irresponsible, or lazy rather than overwhelmed or struggling. From a Black collectivist viewpoint, such an approach may be considered a dismissive, socially isolating, stigmatizing injustice. The missed assignment becomes a “debt with interest” that the student cannot repay. Black college students, whose worldview emphasizes community and collective responsibility, witness the disjuncture between their treatment in the academy versus personal finance options that allow them to restore, for example, a delinquent credit account. The purpose of this chapter is to provide higher education instructors with philosophical and practical guidance, within a restorative justice framework, to co-create structured catch-up plans with students.
TopIntroduction
During the late 1970s, the U.S. post-Civil Rights Movement era, Howard Zehr, called the “grandfather of restorative justice” (Book, 2023, para. 4) sought to answer these lingering criminal justice questions: “How should we, as a society, respond to wrongdoing? When a crime occurs, when an injustice or harm is committed, what needs to happen? What does justice require?” (Zehr, 2015 p. 5). Zehr’s answer was restorative justice, a holistic, “victim-centered” best practice, which Susan Sharpe (as cited in Zehr, 2015) summarizes thusly: “put key decisions into the hands of those most affected by crime; make justice more healing, and ideally, more transformative, and reduce the likelihood of future offenses” (p. 6). Zehr acknowledges that, while restorative justice practices began as a response to “strengths” and “injustices” of the American criminal justice system, specifically “burglary and other property crimes that are usually viewed (often incorrectly) as relatively minor offenses” (Zehr, 2015, p. 6), it has grown to encompass other fields of study and areas of life, in the United States and abroad. According to Zehr, since 1989, New Zealand has made restorative conferences the “hub of its entire youth justice system;” and in South Africa, aspects of restorative justice inform “responses to mass violence” (Zehr, 2015, p. 6).
Zehr’s The Little Book of Restorative Justice, a handbook reprinted in 2015, served as a catalyst fostering the aforementioned flowerings. Originally published in 2002, the book was designed to teach a wide variety of actual and potential restorative justice co-creators to think and act accordingly. Indeed, the very fact that Zehr uses the phrase, “Little Book” in the title of his first book about restorative justice shows the connection between the book’s principles and American education. The title references The Little Golden Book, a popular American series of children’s books designed to foster a love of reading, while also teaching morality (i.e., “the golden rule”) which Random House first began publishing in 1942. Not surprisingly, Zehr’s “Little Book” encouraged a wide variety of readers, K-12 teachers, and administrators among them, to consider applying restorative justice principles to their respective communities. Extant literature does not, however, make specific connections between applied restorative justice principles and online undergraduate higher education.
Zehr (2015) says that restorative justice functions best when its practitioners—victims, offenders, administrators, witnesses, and other co-creators, recognize that they are all part of a community, which must respect its constituents:
If I had to put restorative justice into one word, I would choose respect: respect for all, even those who are different from us, even those who seem to be our enemies. Respect reminds us of our interconnectedness but also our differences. Respect insists that we balance our concern for all parties. (p. 44)
According to Zehr (as cited in Mika & Zehr, 2023), balancing such concerns requires that community members follow 10 “signposts,” or key principles, of restorative justice:
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Focus on the harms of crime rather than the rules that have been broken.
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Show equal concern and commitment to victims and offenders, involving both in the process of justice.