Join Dr. Ariana Brazier, sheba gittens, and Dr. Amanda K Gross for their June 25th session: Discipline Versus Punishment: Integrating Anti-Racism And Consent-Based Practices For Co-Creating Liberatory Classrooms
For more conference info and to register click here.
Discipline Versus Punishment: Integrating Anti-Racism And Consent-Based Practices For Co-Creating Liberatory Classrooms
This session will consider the discourse of punitive school policies, unpack assumptions, goals, and practices surrounding anti-racism and consent within Restorative Practices, and invite participants to engage in envisioning liberatory futures for Restorative Justice within education.
Related to the conference theme, our session will examine discourses in education around discipline and punishment, how they are often conflated, and the ways Restorative Justice can present as non-punitive despite continuing to perpetuate coercive strategies, particularly in the gaps between restorative practice and embodied anti-racism, cultural colonialism, and power-shifting and consent.
This session draws upon the work of Pittsburgh, PA’s YUIR (Youth Undoing Institutional Racism) which organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline and bring an anti-racist analysis to restorative practice models within Pittsburgh Public Schools. The Discipline versus Punishment framework was developed by Dr. Ariana Brazier.
Dr. Ariana Brazier
Ariana Denise Brazier, Ph.D. is a Black queer feminist and smiley sad mom-girl. She is a play-driven community-organizer and educator who is motivated to raise a joyous, free Black child. Ari received her doctoral degree in English, Critical & Cultural Studies from the University of Pittsburgh in April 2021. Ari has been described by the people she loves as southern, explosive, abstract, intricate, and awkward. As a researcher, Ari’s work is centered on Black children and families living in poverty in the southeast United States. She documents how Black child play functions as a grassroots method of community-based storytelling, teaching, and organizing. Motherhood continues to be a kaleidoscopic experience. All the while, her son, Remix, is the most evolutionary joy she has ever known. Ari is the founder, CEO & President of the 501c3 nonprofit ATL Parent Like A Boss, Inc. (Parent LAB). Parent LAB's mission is to enhance generational literacies through PLAY in underserved African American communities.
sheba gittens
sheba gittens is an anti-racist heArtivist, art educator, and creative consultant based in this iteration of the world. She is a trained Wellness Practitioner, Anti-Racist Raja Yoga Instructor, and Joy Facilitator. As a creative consultant she has supported numerous organizations and businesses nationally and internationally in manifesting events, programs, and workshops grounded in equity for humanity and that honor intersectionality. As an integrative multimedia heArtivist, she uses mixed media to educate and expand the consciousness of those she serves and currently works with the Ujamaa Collective, Balafon West African Dance Ensemble, and YogaRoots On Location.
Dr. Amanda K. Gross
Dr. Amanda K. Gross is an artist, intersectional anti-racist organizer, and a weaver of people, ideas, and threads and creative director of Mistress Syndrome, LLC. Amanda has a PhD in Expressive Arts from the European Graduate School and an MA in Conflict Transformation from Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. She is certified at the 200 hour RYT level by YogaRoots On Location’s Anti-Racist Raja Yoga School. Her first full length book, White Women, Get Ready: How Healing Post-Traumatic Mistress Syndrome Leads to Anti-Racist Changewas published in July 2024. She has a chapter in Resistance: Confronting Violence, Power and Abuse within Peace Churchesand one in the forthcoming book, Bodies and Beliefs: Purity Culture and the Rhetoric of Religious Trauma.