�������ϲʿ����ӿ�

UTSC Vice-Dean Faculty Affairs, Equity, & Success, Jessica Fields

At the �������ϲʿ����ӿ� (UTSC) and across North America, the 2023-24 academic year was marked by debates over academic freedom and the right to peaceful protest; concern regarding Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anti-Palestinian racism; and challenges to collegiality between members of our community. UTSC faced these challenges while still reeling from violence against a gender studies classroom at the University of Waterloo and the long after-effects of a COVID-19 pandemic. During that time, early career scholars faced significant challenges establishing their research programs; women and racialized students, staff, librarians, faculty reported an increase in gendered and racialized microaggressions; and anyone with care responsibilities or needs felt the strain of lockdown orders and increased vulnerability. 

These conditions have left many feeling a need for restoration—(re)building trust, (re)establishing wellness, and (re)creating infrastructures of care (Chan, Ghali, and Prinsloo 2023). Building on the success of 2023-24’s Year of Mentorship theme, the Office of the Vice-Dean Faculty Affairs, Equity, and Success (OVDFAES), under the leadership of Vice-Dean Jessica Fields, proposes working in 2024-25 “Toward Restoration.” Restoration evokes the themes of rebuilding, repairing, relationality, and reconciliation; it suggests the need to slow down and to notice where more care is warranted. More specifically, the framework of restorative practices includes building relationships and addressing conflict through participatory methods (Wachtel 2016). When harm occurs, the goal is to restore relationships while also holding accountable the people and institutions who offend. Restorative practices usefully encompass both prevention of and responses to misconduct, rather than treating the latter through a punitive lens (Sopcak and Hood 2022). However, for restorative measures to have a lasting effect, organizations need to build and sustain cultural and institutional conditions that support the framework’s values (Hopkins 2015). Many will say those conditions are not in place at UTSC. Toward Restoration signals, first, a recognition that we are not yet there and, second, a desire to get there. 

Indeed, Toward Restoration builds on the efforts of those at UTSC who have already recognized a need for restoration and articulated an interest in working toward it. For example, in February 2022, racialized and Indigenous women faculty in the UTSC English Department identified restorative practices as a way to address the ways harm and conflict contribute to a hostile climate for vulnerable members of the university community, including students, early career and contingent faculty and librarians, and Black, Indigenous, racialized, queer, trans, and disabled people. Similarly, in 2023-24, the Mentorship Excellence and Diversity (MEAD) advisory committee recognized the importance of mentorship efforts emerging from the OVDFAES Year of Mentorship but also became increasingly interested in building “infrastructures of care” whose effectiveness did not rest on the success of individualizing efforts. Finally, seven teams of UTSC faculty, staff, and librarians received OVDFAES funding to support mentorship partnerships among Black and Muslim feminists; faculty and librarians working toward equity, diversity, and inclusion on our campus; neurodivergent and autistic educators; educators committed to sensory, affective, imaginative and land-based pedagogy; educators committed to student-centered and inclusive teaching and learning; educators committed to Indigenizing curriculum; and early career scholars seeking writing community. These mentorship partnerships represent grassroots and transformative efforts toward restoration. 

Through Toward Restoration, the OVDFAES will support new initiatives, and amplify existing efforts to transform the institutional culture of UTSC into a more restorative one. These include, but are not limited to, the following.

1. Leveraging the Equity Matters Seminar to support a campus-wide conversation about restoration, broadly speaking. We look forward to welcoming a speaker who can speak to restorative practices and share experiences building and sustaining respectful relationships and just conditions at the individual and institutional levels of university life. 
2. Launching a UTSC Speaker Series that highlights and amplifies the work of UTSC faculty, librarians, and staff who are already building and/or restoring relationships among people, with the land, and through infrastructural change within and beyond the UTSC community. 
3. Building our institutional understanding of restoration through Study Groups open to faculty, librarians, staff, and students who read and discuss key texts on restoring and rebuilding relationships. 
4. Hosting and co-hosting workshops and training on restorative practices for faculty, librarians, staff, and students who hold academic and administrative leadership positions. 

The OVDFAES invites other UTSC units, leaders, and campus members to join us in working Toward Restoration that reflects and honours the origins of restorative justice movements and the diversity of our campus community. Restorative practices have long been a part of Indigenous communities and anti-racist movements worldwide (Sopcak and Hood 2022; Wachtel 2016); this framework thus, first, is rooted in the communities (Indigenous, Black, racialized, feminist, crip, queer, trans, and more) that are often vulnerable to harm and, second, reflects the Inclusive Excellence principles that guide our campus.

References

Chan, Leslie, Mona Ghali, and Paul Prinsloo. 2023. “Imagining Higher Education as Infrastructures of Care.” Pp. 111–36 in Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures, edited by L. Czerniewicz and C. Cronin. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers.

Sopcak, Paul, and Kevin Hood. 2022. “Building a Culture of Restorative Practice and Restorative Responses to Academic Misconduct.” in Academic Integrity in Canada: An Enduring and Essential Challenge. Vol. 1, Ethics and Integrity in Educational Contexts, edited by S. E. Eaton and J. Christensen Hughes. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Wachtel, Ted. 2016. “Defining Restorative.” International Institute for Restorative Practices. Retrieved June 19, 2024 ().
 

Previous themes:

2023-24 Year of Mentorship