Summer e-Series 2022 Keynote Presenters

Skye Bowen

Skye Bowen is an educator with 20 years of teaching experience. She is a passionate leader and advocate for equity and social justice. Skye and her husband, Orlando Bowen, dealt with the trauma of Orlando being assaulted by two police officers in a racial profiling incident in Peel. However, despite this challenge, it motivated her to pour into the lives of young people even more. Her role as an educator also gave her the opportunity to partner with her husband’s youth leadership charity, One Voice One Team Youth Leadership Organization. Together, they educate, mentor and empower youth to engage in a variety of outreach programs. Skye taught in a youth correctional facility where she saw first hand the impact of the school to prison pipeline. This further motivated Skye to advocate for racialized youth in order to address the systemic racism in the justice and education system that she observed. She developed professional learning in restorative justice focused on anti-racism, anti-oppression and rooted in Afro-Indigenous culture. She is a strong advocate for social justice, youth advocacy, and community. Skye is currently a high school vice-principal and also provides support for educators and system leaders in various school boards on anti-racism, anti-oppression, and restorative justice. She has been married for 20 years and they have three teenage boys, Dante, Justice, and Marcus.

Session:

Restorative Justice in Education - Shifting the Narrative to Center Student Well-being

This keynote session will discuss the critical need to rethink how restorative justice in education should be approached in schools. Skye will bring awareness to the roots of restorative justice in education and the Afro-Indigenous history of restorative justice. What are we missing and where have we gone wrong? Skye will unpack how bias, privilege, and power has created incredible harm in education and what we need to do to re-think and reflect on our practice in order to be game changers and relational activists/healers. This session will bring perspective for creating authentic RJ communities centred on relationships, youth empowerment, and social justice advocacy. Restorative Justice in Education has the potential to change the culture in order to change the game. Who’s ready?

Kristin Reimer

Kristin Reimer is a Senior Lecturer in Monash University’s School of Education, Culture and Society (Melbourne, Australia). She was born on the territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee peoples (Kitchener, Ontario) and now lives on the unceded land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. At Monash, Kristin works to advance the idea of education as a humanising practice. Restorative Justice Education (RJE), the main focus of Kristin’s work, is one such humanising approach in schools. Beyond RJE, other threads of Kristin’s research and practice reinforce education as a connective endeavour: alternative education for justice-involved youth; access to higher education for non-traditional students; experiences of refugee and asylum-seeking university students; global citizenship education; and intergenerational teaching relationships.

Session: Transformative RJE: Making Sense and Making Meaning

Restorative Justice in Education tends to be shaped into whatever ‘makes sense’ to those implementing it. As a default, that often means a practice that fits (somewhat) neatly within the usual ways of doing school. One of the things that Covid has allowed us to do is question our default positions. (Re)centering RJE as a transformative, disruptive, relational, justice-oriented approach, whether in schools or in homes, can help us ensure that RJE makes sense to our very cores. This type of RJE can also help us to realise the two main purposes of school: To help us to live well; and to help us create a world worth living in for all. In this talk, Kristin draws on Antonovsky’s Sense of Coherence concept, the work of colleagues, and her own research in schools.