The Project

The idea of reparation requires us to understand the interconnections between past, present and future in both the formation of injustice and its repair.  Unless injustices are actively addressed they can endure in systems of education – which also shape lives-to-come.

Reparative justice is an ‘action-oriented’ approach. It asks us to recognise past and present structural injustices of schooling systems – particularly deep-seated racial and classed inequalities. The lens of reparation offers us routes to construct fairer futures of education.

Reparative justice in education can take many different forms. It can be material – like the redistribution of resources. It can involve epistemic repair – such as efforts to decolonise the curriculum. It can support reparative pedagogies – seeking to foster new relations of justice. Our project seeks to explore different modes and models of reparative justice for education.

Even though schooling often reproduces social inequalities, injustice is not an inevitability for reparative futures of education.

Understanding intersecting injustices and pathways to redress is a collective undertaking. That’s why Repair-Ed takes a participatory approach, working with diverse primary school-communities across Bristol, England.

Detailed ethnographies and histories of schooling across the city’s geographies of deprivation and advantage examine educational injustices, focusing on their racial and classed dynamics.

Through participatory methods, the project investigates not only the experiences of schooling among different groups but also the contested meanings of reparative redress.