Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Restorative Writing: Connecting Adjudicated Students To Local And Global Communities, Cheryl Lynn Duckworth

CAHSS Faculty Presentations, Proceedings, Lectures, and Symposia

Poets and memoirists have known for millennia that the written word can clarify, beautify and heal, as the students of Room 5C often discover. Writing, of course, is also a key tool of peaceful social change. As such, the written word can be where personal and social change, structure and agency, meet in the classroom. Yet how often is this power leveraged in our juvenile detention home schools? How often do we ask juvenile offenders to be critical participants, even leaders, in their communities? Freire would remind us that the problems juvenile offender-students face are themselves the best curriculum.

This …