Winn Awarded William T. Grant Distinguished Fellowship

January 9, 2015

Wisconsin Center for Education (WCER) researcher Maisha T. Winn recently received the William T. Grant Distinguished Fellowship Award for her proposal, “Restorative Justice and the Reclamation of Civic Education for Youth.” The goal of the project, according to the William T. Grant Foundation website, is to “better understand the challenges organizations face when initiating restorative justice initiatives.” The $154,000 grant is scheduled to run from March 2015 to February 2016.

“These awards reflect important and enduring features of our grant-making,” Foundation President Adam Gamoran, a former UW-Madison School of Education faculty member who directed the Wisconsin Center for Education Research from 2004-2013, said in a news release. “This includes a strong belief that research can address practical questions in a way that advances fundamental knowledge about children and youth.”

Winn, a faculty member in the School of Education’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, will examine the ways in which youth participation in restorative justice practices supports responsible citizenship and civic learning in schools and communities. Winn said she came to appreciate the importance of restorative justice as a result of the completion of a research project on literacy and the experiences of youth in detention centers.

Winn will spend the first six months of her award at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency (NCCD) in Oakland, California, which recently launched a large-scale restorative justice project. She will assist the NCCD project director in the project’s launch and in providing technical assistance and training for school, prison, police and court personnel in restorative justice. The training will include efforts to raise awareness of how punitive and exclusionary practices are harmful to youth outcomes, and will explore alternative approaches to discipline that promote healthier relationships and foster learning.

 After returning to Madison, Winn will work with the restorative justice program at a local YMCA. Out of her experiences, Winn hopes to model the benefits of restorative justice practices, with the goal of creating restorative justice pre-service training modules for middle and high school teachers. In restorative justice programs, youth are invited to exercise their rights as engaged citizens and help create a community response to injustice.

Winn says that findings from this study will provide concrete and specific pedagogical and policy strategies for eradicating the discipline gap in high schools that has contributed to black and Latino youth being pushed out of schools and communities.