Introduction to Restorative Facilitation Skills is a skills course that offers experiential credit and is designed to introduce students to the experience and facilitation of restorative practices. The course begins with a brief overview of the principles underlying restorative justice, and examines how these principles are put into practice in a number of settings. Students will learn about and actively participate in restorative circles in class, and will also engage in role play through simulations of circles, conferences, and possibly other restorative practices using hypothetical scenarios. The course will offer regular opportunities for students to experience these practices, building facilitation skills, while seeing these skills modelled and receiving feedback. Students will prepare for each weekly class by completing assigned readings, videos, films, or podcasts, and writing reflections in their individual class journals. Guest speakers with expertise in restorative facilitation will join us on occasion.

As this course is an introductory course, students will focus on facilitating restorative practices that focus on community-building; healing from lower-level criminal violations, civil wrongs, and behavioral violations; and conflict resolution that might arise in schools, workplaces, and after civil wrongs, such as neighbor disputes, medical malpractice, environmental justice, elder abuse, and the like.

Students will also learn about a variety of restorative practices, practice restorative facilitation, learn the goals and norms of these practices, and learn how to thoughtfully design and prepare an effective restorative practice with input from the stakeholders. The students will practice creating a supportive and safe environment, develop and strengthen active-listening and trauma-responsive skills, facilitate constructive conversations between participants, as well as familiarize themselves with the elements of restorative circles and conferences. The course will consider a number of settings in which these practices have been used in legal and legal-adjacent contexts.

This course is designed to be an introduction to building facilitation skills, which may be useful in many ways for lawyers who represent individual clients, work in policy or transactional areas, private firms, non-profits, or city and social service agencies. They are useful whether students become restorative facilitators or not, as the skills practiced in this class can be applied to attorney-client relationships; all forms of dispute resolution, including international human rights and transitional justice; landlord/tenant disputes; consumer protection; racial justice; criminal law reform; torts; education law and policy; working with juveniles and families; prosecutors and defense attorneys seeking alternatives to incarceration and diversion outcomes; achieving positive outcomes for clients in civil matters; and considerations of ethics and professional responsibilities.

Recommended for the following Professional Pathways: Civil Rights/Civil Liberties; Criminal Defense; Criminal Prosecution

2 Credits