Wondrous Uncertainty: Transforming Student Educational Experiences Using Restorative Practices

One of the primary purposes of education is to help students make sense of their lived experiences. In the process of becoming, students navigate multiple relationships (school, peers, adults, and with self). These relationships often cause conditions of uncertainty which can be managed and transformed using restorative practices in tandem with the academic disciplines taught in school. Over the last decade this has been my inquiry puzzle, “As educators, how can we embrace uncertainty with students as a way of helping to empower them through their dignity, with the academic disciplines as a lens through which relational learning occurs in all domains?”This is a philosophical dissertation that is composed using theory from various domains and five papers I published over the last four years. Each publication used the narrative methodology in various forms, which allowed me to investigate the inquiry puzzle in multiple educational settings. Two models emerge from this work which add to the literature in restorative practices. The first model is an expanded version of The Relationship Window (Vaandering, 2013) that integrates the theoretical foundations in this text and the practical implementations that occurred throughout the published papers. The second model explicates a new restorative circle which I call “The Academic Circle.” This circle is meant to act as a practical guide for educators who are hoping to replicate the types of interactions that emerge in the research.The insights that emerge from this work are 1) restorative practices, while often used to transform interpersonal relationships is a model that can be applied to curriculum and create authentic educational experiences that align with restorative interpersonal relationships, 2) teacher education should seek ways to provide pre-service teachers with opportunities to think relationally when considering how to create educational experiences that can act as a transformational tool for human development, 3) The restorative process is synonymous with the ontology of Narrative Inquiry. Because the restorative process is the act of being in a narrative way, there is an added layer of reliability to the methodology, moving it from one that is executed to one that is lived.Advisors: Lawrence C. Scharmann and Elaine Chan