“We Are Having This Problem, Let’s Have a Meeting”: Understanding Two Class Meetings Through Dialogic, Restorative Practices

Time spent on “building a relation of care and trust is not time wasted” (Noddings. Oxford Review of Education, 38(6), 774, 2012). This chapter explores how time spent on two class meetings reflect dialogic restorative practices that support effective learning conditions as they work to sustain and [re]balance agreed upon value-orientations and practices in a classroom community. Drawing on data from a 2-year ethnographic case study in a diverse, urban second-grade classroom in the US, we closely examine whole-class talk across two class meetings: one brief and impromptu, the other a planned 30-min class meeting. Analytic framing includes dialogic conditions for voice, premises for circle processes and restorative justice pillars, and the classroom community’s own co-authored agreements. Findings show how dedicated class meeting time not only obliged commitment and care, but the dialogic restorative practices also manifest in these two meetings cultivated conditions for effective learning. This study matters because we learn better when we feel we have a say in decisions that affect us, when we feel listened to, when we commit to actively listen to each other and build on each other’s ideas, and when there is community commitment to listen and consider our ideas.