To what degree can restorative practices be applied to the act of leading people to information? To me, it does not hurt to ponder the possibilities. I’ve been working in the community on these lines recently, and see many many connections to what libraries and librarians already do. Certainly, restorative practices already are used to resolve organizational conflicts and problems. It also applies to the concept of leadership within the community. And of course, public libraries tie in to the idea of habilitating young people into society before they ever have negative encounters with the justice system. But let’s start at the beginning – explaining restorative practices as they apply to justice, how they have changed to apply to a more broad spectrum of ideas and finally how they might apply to libraries.
What is Restorative Justice?
s. Restorative Justice refers to a number of things:
- it is a formal practice (conferencing) that focuses on how one person’s actions caused harm and the effect that harm had on others.
- it is a means to prevent crime by increasing social capital and establishing norms for resolving problems before people commit crimes.
- it is thinking less about punitive (doing to) and paternalistic (doing for) methods of justice and more about collaborative (doing with) means that include (among others) the people harmed, support people for the people harmed, and support persons for the person doing harm.
Anyone witnessing a restorative justice conference will likely see a contrast between what is said in conference (where solutions and repairing harm are emphasized) and what might be said in the media (where the emphasis is usually on conflict and strife).
Last year, Isaac Gilman managed to apply the formal Restorative Justice practices to library service in his article, “Beyond Books: Restorative Librarianship in Juvenile Detention Centers” that can be found in this volume of Public Libraries.
Restorative Practices More Broadly
Social capital does more than prevent crime, and that’s why restorative practices are used outside the justice concept. For instance, school disciplinary processes can include a restorative model and businesses will use restorative practices to resolve Human Resources conflicts. Another interesting thing is that people are learning to use other mechanisms to “Do With” (circle conversations, World Cafe, Open Space and so on) that may ‘ignite’ as well as ‘restore.’ Thus, a paradigm of ‘restorative practices’ has been adopted and may be growing over time as people catch on to what this stuff is all about.
In the broad scope, and why I support unconferences in general is that restorative practices are capacity building. You see the results weeks, months and even years after you have acted and continue to see the results over and over and over again. This is in contrast to the “big event” where people get together and vent, gripe, learn, teach or whatnot and usually forget what they learn within a few months and/or look back with frustration because no one has ever acted upon the outcomes of the ‘big event.’
Where This All Connects to Librarianship
This development of ‘long term’ outcomes, focussed on community needs and developing the community’s ability to solve its own problems ought to sound pretty familiar to those who remember the Slow Library, Library 2.0 and Evidence Based Library camps. But what sorts of things are libraries doing or could be doing to promote a ‘restorative’ mindset? Here are a few:
- Support and/or initiate unconferences (aka Podcamps, Barcamps, DrupalCamps, FooCamps, Pecha Kuchas etc etc etc) in the community. Like David Lee King did in Topeka , we did here in Halifax, or what Ann Arbor and Darien seem to do on a reasonably regular basis.
- Learn more about restorative practices, perhaps by volunteering locally. For instance, The Community Justice Society is involved in Community Justice here in Halifax.
- Attend other unconference-like events held around town.
- Just remember the “Doing With” model whenever you engage in library instruction, reference, cataloguing or whatever you do. Think about how many times we have ‘Done For” and how much better it would be if people could learn together – in collaborative, and therefore more innovative and fun ways.
And please please please don’t berate me for the language used here (I see problems with the word ‘restorative’ already. This is not about how we say stuff. This is about doing. Winning. And loving how we win and do.