Restorative Justice Peace Circles Image The Peace Circle Peace Circles are a restorative justice peacemaking strategy that engages whole communities — including and beyond the directly-involved parties who negotiate in the simpler mediation process, also with a facilitator to moderate the dialogue. Like mediation and negotiation, and because of their emphasis on building inclusive, mutually-respectful relationships and bringing groups together, Peace Circle processes include peacebuilding in addition to peacemaking. Practicing sharing, dialogue, and problem-solving in Peace Circles also facilitate students’ peacebuilding citizenship learning. Many Indigenous communities in the Americas and elsewhere in the world have developed, taught, and practiced various kinds of peace circle processes, for many generations. The restorative Peace Circle often follows a process somewhat similar to the Community Circle described earlier, such as passing around a talking piece in sequence, to give everyone present opportunities to offer their response to each of the facilitator’s questions. Community Circles are good practice, to build relationships and skills that later can be used in Peace Circles for overcoming misunderstandings or problem-solving. The restorative Peace Circle is a process for inclusive mutual listening and deliberation, for a group to mutually understand and resolve or transform problems that affect their community. The Circle’s key principles are to include everyone affected (including direct disputants or perpetrators and victims of harm, allies to support each of them, and impartial representatives who care for the affected community), giving each person opportunities to speak about their perspectives and feelings and to engage in the joint process of achieving understanding and fair mutual decisions to which all feel able to consent. A Peace Circle Involves: A preparation process, before the Circle meets, to bring everyone into readiness to engage in a constructive conversation Jointly-agreed norms for respectful and inclusive interaction An impartial facilitator to guide the agenda and dialogue process A talking piece (passed consecutively around the circle in one direction) to designate and share speaking and listening roles Inclusive process and shared responsibility, including direct and indirect stakeholders and their concerns in the problem-solving dialogue An emphasis on developing mutual understanding, healing where needed, and consensus, not on placing blame or punishing. Using a Peace Circle The simpler Community Circle described above as a strategy for building peaceful relationships generally includes items 2-4 and part of item 5. Peace Circles may be used to facilitate pro-active (for instance, language arts learning) practice, using conflict examples from experience or from texts (for example, voicing the perspectives of various characters in a piece of literature or a news story, perhaps inventing a new resolution or a next scene). Once a group has practiced the skills of peace circle dialogue as pro-active community-building and skill-building practice with non-urgent (distant or fictional) conflict examples, then they can use Peace Circles for peacemaking: addressing disagreements or tensions that arise in the classroom, online or schoolyard after they arise, or surfacing a difficult issue that has persisted underneath daily activities. The circulation of a talking piece (symbolizing who has the floor and the attention of the group) to every participant in the circle facilitates constructive communication,as each person has an opportunity to speak (or to pass) while the others listen actively. Peace circles welcome every student's point of view, their social diversity, and their differing concerns, values and needs. In peace circles, participants may engage in critical and creative thinking as they practice listening to various points of view, and analysis and perspective-taking to understand others’ proposals, responses, feelings and needs and to voice their own. Circle dialogues may incorporate persuasion, negotiation, and collaboration to co-invent alternatives or solutions, to guide and enact inclusive democratic decision-making (autonomous or input), an important component in building critical democratic citizenship. Such inclusive group dialogue can be a powerful tool in instilling peacebuilding citizenship inclinations, skills, and confidence, as students learn to think critically about issues, articulate their positions, respond compassionately to other points of view, and collaboratively resolve conflict and foster community relationships, in school settings and beyond. Canadian examples In two Canadian schools, teachers described using Peace Circles to address students’ concerns about social aggression conflicts such as cyberbullying and stealing. They used the following steps: Introduce a talking piece and its meaning Encourage others to actively listen to the person who is talking Ask each student to identify, regarding the conflict in question: What is the problem? Why is it happening? Who is involved? How does this problem make you feel? What can we do to reduce the chances of occurrence of this problem? How are we going to handle this problem if it happens again? Do we have a plan for action? Let us write it down. In one Peace Circle observed in earlier research in Canada, the teacher engaged young primary-grade students in talking about a boys-versus-girls conflict they had been experiencing on the playground at recess. First, she invited students to review their circle agreements: for instance, a girl said the person with the talking piece was the mouth and the others were the ears. The teacher started with a low-risk question, asking students to share something about how recess went that day. Students described games they had played, some said there had been a lot of chasing. One girl said, “We had fun, and didn’t have fun, because the boys were throwing a ball [at us] and acting like they weren’t doing anything. … [The teacher] said we could chase, but not chase and grab. But I feel like [she named two boys]…” The boys denied her accusation, which made the girl angry. The teacher said, “This is something we may need to talk about as a group.” After other children in the Circle shared their recess experiences, the teacher passed the talking piece around a second time, to include “anyone who passed [didn’t speak] who wants to take a turn” (two more girls spoke). The teacher summarized and affirmed all students’ points of view, then passed the talking piece again inviting children to suggest ways to improve the situation, then summarized again briefly. Students then role-played their preferred ways of handling this playground space-sharing problem. Summary In summary, in a healthy Peace Circle process, the teacher-facilitator: prepares students for the norms and process of inclusive dialogue in Circle and circulating a talking piece, which may be quite different from other kinds of classroom interaction; engages all students in naming the values for Circle interaction that they want to uphold and have peers uphold; passes a talking piece sequentially around the circle to give every participant an opportunity to speak (or to pass and not speak) regarding each question the facilitator airs; usually offers her/his own brief response to her/his prompt first, to lower the risk for students and model the process; demonstrates compassionate listening in briefly summarizing the viewpoints shared in each round; enacts and encourages a no-blame restorative approach, assuming that various participants may have contributed to the problem in various ways and are capable to contribute to resolution or reconciliation; supports participants to move through developing understanding toward sharing responsibility for peacemaking by suggesting ways they might help to solve or heal the problem or support the people affected.