Restorative Practices to Resolve Conflict/Build Relationships: Katy Hutchison at TEDxWestVancouverED

I just wanna stand here for a second and bask in Shane's wake here's the thing in life stuff is going to happen thankfully lots of good stuff but sometimes bad stuff and I believe because we share this beautiful earth of ours by living in community that when we come across a mess we have a moral responsibility to roll up our sleeves and to get busy and to clean that mess up sometimes in the process of cleaning up a mess we're going to realize we're standing right beside the person that caused it and it's in that moment that I think there exists an enormous amount of power and possibility I have two stories to share with you today one about a tiny mess and one about an enormous mess and I want to share with you what I think they have to do with education my father was a naval commander kind gentle man he was an engineer by training which meant he loved to find the most efficient way to solve a problem well I'm sure he saw his share of conflict through the wars at home he was a true peacemaker he seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to restore order to our chaotic dining table he didn't ask a lot of us as a family but the one request that my father made was that none of us use his beard trimming scissors I had two older brothers in an older sister and they had desks of their own filled with supplies and my mother had her own sewing room so scissors weren't a particular novelty to them but for me at seven I was fascinated with the fact that my father would have something that only he was allowed to use and I remember watching him meticulously shaping his beard with these scissors they were tiny they were sharp and they were very very pointy so one day I was doing a little craft project which involved an enormous amount of paper a huge amount of glue and a few staples and I decided that I needed to cut something so I went into the bathroom and I took my father's scissors they were amazing until of course I cut through a big blob of wet glue and a couple of staples and I realized that I had damaged my father's scissors so as stealthily as I had taken them out of the medicine cabinet I put them back the next day my father came to me he crouched down to eye level and he looked at me and he said did you use my scissors and I lied and then my father told me how disappointed he wasn't me and he proceeded to show me how the scissors no longer easily cut his beard they snagged and pulled with the hair painfully and he asked me again did you use my scissors and this time I told him I had so my father took me for a walk in the garden and he didn't say much for a while and then he started to talk to me about honesty and about respecting people's property and most importantly about respecting their feelings we came in the house and he showed me how to clean the dried glue off the blades with rubbing alcohol and how to finely sand the nick out with sandpaper and then he made us two huge cups of hot chocolate with lots of marshmallows and we never talked about the scissor incident again years later when I had children of my own I was grappling with finding a discipline technique that felt like it fit most of my friends were using the timeout but you know it seemed counterintuitive to me and also with toddler twins it seems almost impossible to manage two children in two different spaces and also it seems like the child who was most affected by a transgression ended up being the one that got the least amount of attention so I thought back to the way that I was raised and I realized it in my family had really been much more about the time in when something went wrong my parents would sit down with us and they'd take the time to explain how our behavior was impacting a family and then they would help us figure out a way to make things better so my husband Bob and I adopted the time and method with our children and that was the way we raised them and I'm sure initially a lot of the language went over their little heads to begin with but ultimately what it did was it set up an opportunity for my children to realize that what our default position was going to be was going to be to come together to talk about behavior to talk about feelings and to talk about the impact that our actions have on the people that we care about two weeks before my children's fifth birthday I found myself standing in the emergency room of the local hospital watching dr. was a defibrillator paddles in his hand desperately trying to resuscitate my husband just an hour before he and two friends had left our quiet New Year's party to go check on the home of the vacationing neighbor whose son had decided to host a party of his own something had gone wrong police officers started to fill that emergency room and I stood there looking at the doctors the nurses the EMTs those officers and I realized every one of them was just desperately clinging to everything that had been trained to do as professionals when the most unthinkable of situations begins to unfold but I also understood for them that at some moment their shift was going to end and they were going to get to go home but you see I wasn't at work my shift was never going to end and I realize standing there in the middle of all that chaos that somehow I was going to have to find a way to live with whatever had just happened and more importantly to move forward in my life in a positive way I left my dead 40 year old husband at the hospital and I went home to wait for my children to wake up so I could tell them that their daddy was dead I looked for the plainest words I could and I crouched down to their level and I explained to them and after a long pause my little boy looked at me and he said can I have some Cheerios of course because that's what happened children wake up and they're hungry and after they eat they play because that's their job they spend time outside and then maybe after a meal somebody will help him with a bath tuck them into bed read them a story they go to sleep they wake up the next day and they do it all over again day after day after day and usually one of the people that makes that come together for child is their mother and that was my job and I realized that I couldn't make their little lives be all about my husband's God so I made them a promise I promised them that underneath the horror of what had just happened to our family we would find a gift and for house one day an opportunity to share that gift autopsy results revealed that Bob had died from multiple kicks to the head but the information really stopped there a code of silence descended over the small community we lived in none of the 200 young people that were at that party gave the police the information that they needed to move forward with their investigation the media were on my doorstep immediately shoving a microphone in my facing what do you want to see happen to the person that did this I thought I would throw out my children had just lost their father I didn't want them to lose me in the process if I had responded frankly the way society expected me to filled with hatred filled with vengeance what kind of person what kind of parent was I going to become absolutely I wanted answers absolutely I wanted somebody to be accountable but I also wanted to know that my children were going to be okay that my community was going to be okay and that included whoever was on the other side of this horrible tragedy it was five years before Ryan Aldridge was arrested and charged in connection with my husband's death the police called to tell me they were ready to make the arrest and I told them I was on my way what are you talking about why would you want to meet the person that killed your husband leave that to the police to the system I said I need to sit down with them I need to speak to him face-to-face I need to understand what was going on in his life to make him capable of doing what he did I need him to understand what's been going on in our lives I needed time in 16 hours after Ryan was arrested I was back in that community sitting in a small interrogation room about to meet the young man that killed my husband I thought my heart would come out my mouth I expected some kind of monster don't walk through the door not a young man that could be my son your son somebody's best friend he sat across from me slumped over sobbing I handed a ball after ball of tissue and it was all I could do not to get out of my seat to cross over the other side of the room and to give him a hug because he looked like that was what he needed more than just about anything we didn't say a whole lot to each other when we first met but I told him his confession was the first step in the right direction and the next step I urged him to consider would be pleading guilty so that neither of our families would have to endure a trial as soon as why I went to gee how I worried about him I had no idea what was going to happen behind bars to support his rehabilitation so I began to educate myself about that into the system and it was then that I learned about the powerful model of restorative justice now our conventional system you're all familiar with it asks the question what law was broken who broke that law and what's the punishment going to be but it pays little attention to the needs of the victim or the community the restorative model on the other hand works on the assumption that when harm happens in our community it is violation of relationship and the questions are slightly different we want to know what happened who's been affected and what are we going to do to make things right Ryan served three out of five years of his sentence and during that time we did a properly facilitated or sort of process called of a victim offender mediation I spent an entire day in jail with Ryan when I hear the political rhetoric about getting tough on crime man that's what we did that day we got tough on crime lots of Tears lots of long silences where neither of us could find the words but ultimately it was an opportunity for us to find some humanity around a situation that to this point had been anything but humane I don't think that Ryan went out that day with the intention of killing somebody what I understand now is eating made a series of poor choices throughout his adolescence in teen years that culminated a fatal one that brought our lives together Ryan had been a small child he had a speech impediment he was picked on and bullied in school when his parents divorced he didn't know where he belonged when he lost a friend in the drinking driving crash he didn't understand that getting drunk and putting her fist through the wall does not qualify as grieving the more time we spent together the more that we realized we had things in common because that is what happens when you share space with someone we talked about the things that mattered to us our families a love of the outdoors we discovered we had a mutual interest in art he went to a cell he brought a sketchbook back to show me his drawings I brought my laptop I showed him the presentation that I developed for youth around social responsibility and I said to him it's a powerful message but it occurs to me that it's only half the story perhaps you'd like to share it with me and after he got to jail Ryan and I worked together for a number of years sharing her story with thousands of kids in DC but we don't work together anymore for what I like to think are all the right reasons because Ryan's finished his sentence he's moved on with his life he's employed he just got married I found out last week they're expecting a family the fact that Ryan seems incapable now of inflicting any further harm is the gift that I was looking for I reflect back to the lessons that my father taught me about stepping up accepting responsibility moving forward and forgiving how that shaped the way I parent how that shaped the way I chose to deal with Ryan and I feel grateful but what does this have to do with education it has everything to do with education because what we're doing is we're teaching young people to engage in and maintain relationships and the way that we do that is by modeling qualities such as tolerance inclusiveness respect integrity empathy and forgiveness the restorative mall that I encountered when I was looking for truth and accountability has applications far beyond the bounds of the criminal justice system we call it restorative practices when we're talking about problem-solving in our communities in our places of work and most especially in our educational settings I'll leave the measurement of the performance and the efficacy of restorative practices up to the practitioners and the academics but let me say this is an advocate who's had the opportunity to visit hundreds of schools all over the world there is a palpable difference in a restorative school as soon as you walk through the door greater connection between children of different ages greater connection between students and teachers between teachers and administration students describe a sense of pride in their community because they feel like they have ownership they develop a skill set for problem-solving at the ground level teachers describe their classrooms as being calmer administrators spend way less time doling out suspensions and much more time delegating peacemaking I wonder what would have happened to the trajectory of Ryan's life had he had an opportunity for a restorative conversation when he was in school and you see young people will take these skills home with them I visited an inner-city school in Baltimore recently an elementary school that was renowned for its restorative programming the school was located in the midst of a number of housing projects there was open drug dealing going on right outside the door but as soon as I walked through those doors every classroom I visited was using the circle in some way to either facilitate learning or problem-solving and the principal shared a story with me she said two mothers came bursting through the front door of the office screaming at one another obviously engaged in a heated argument and they stopped yelling just long enough to ask to see the principal and when she appeared they said we need one of those circle things our kids keep talking about to solve our argument I believe if we raise a generation of young people who expect a restorative opportunity and learn that hone those skills while they're in school then they will take that out into their lives and when they become employed when they have families in their own that is what they're going to look to where am i I'm concerned about what I see in the media in terms of the way restorative that or excuse me the way bullying and anti-bullying initiatives are portrayed I feel like the focus is so much on labeling people as either being the bully or the victim or the bystander when I think if we're honest with ourselves as human beings were capable of being all three we need to drop the labels we need to focus on the behavior that erodes our sense of community and I know of no better way of doing that than engaging in restorative practices whether we're parents or whether were teachers or whether we're both what we're engaged in here is raising and nurturing human beings not human doings whoops I'd love to think that my children going to find meaningful ways to put food on their table but what interests me more is who they're going to be one of those they do whatever it is they do I want my children to be kind to people I want them to be good partners parents co-workers I haven't spoken to Ryan in a long time but I felt the need to check in with him recently and I called him and he told me about his new job and he told me about his wedding about the baby that was on the way and I asked him what's important to you Ryan wouldn't you know what he said time he looks back on his life and he thinks how differently things might have turned out if he'd taken the time to think through some of his decisions and now he says he carves out lots of time for intention and for purpose and to cultivate his relationships for the people that he cares about so Monday morning if you have the privilege of beginning your day in the presence of a group of young people in a classroom I encourage you push the desks aside bring the chairs into a circle sit together have a time in if your day on the other hand might begin in a staff room or an office you might want to try the same thing I assure you that it will enrich the relationship that you have in your learning community and that is going to be a conversation worth having thank you so much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 384,351

Rating: 4.810791 out of 5

Keywords: tedx talk, Restorative Justice, Canada, English, tedx talks, ted x, Education, ted talk, Community, Relationships, Forgiveness, tedx, Katy Hutchison, TEDxWestVancouverED, Squamish, ted, ted talks

Id: wcLuVeHlrSs

Length: 18min 20sec (1100 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 10 2013