Open, vulnerable, listening and connection. These are the words that come to mind when senior Sophia Christodoulou, co-president of The Petey Greene Program at Tufts, thinks of a restorative practice circle.
The Petey Greene Program is a national organization that partners with carceral facilities and reentry programs to provide education to people who are either currently or formerly incarcerated in the United States. Christodoulou, as co-president of the PGP branch at Tufts, felt inspired to organize a restorative practice circle event for the student tutors who go into local facilities. After meeting Ashley Rose, Tufts’ restorative practices program director, at an event centered on restorative justice, Christodoulou knew she wanted to bring in Ashley Rose to lead a circle with PGP.
“[A restorative practice circle] is one of the most powerful ways to build community and feel connection quite quickly,” Christodoulou said.
At the PGP event, Ashley Rose helped facilitate discussion between tutors.
“We invited tutors to come, and we basically all sat in a circle, and Ashley started. She led us … starting with simple introduction questions and then getting deeper about what your values are and how it connects to being a Petey Greene tutor and your ideas on education,” Christodoulou said.
Ashley Rose, who works on the student life team, arrived at Tufts about a year ago and has spearheaded the university’s efforts to invest in this work. She emphasized that restorative practices focus on building community, not just bringing people back into the community after conflict occurs.
“As the director of restorative practices, my job is to really uplift a sense of belonging before anything happens,” Ashley Rose said. “I know you might be familiar with the term restorative justice, which is often healing after harm. Restorative practices — that’s basically the activities that keep you in community.”
She explained that restorative practices have largely drawn inspiration from Indigenous communities. Rather than incarcerating or punishing people, the focus is on bringing people back into the community, often in circle conversations with elders and peers.
“One of the ways in which they’ve done this — and again, this is all over the world, not just in native cultures — but everything about restorative justice really anchors in there the idea of circle practice, which would be people being able to sit together in community, giving everyone an opportunity to talk,” she said.
Before coming to Tufts, Ashley Rose worked for nine years at Suffolk University’s Center for Restorative Justice, training “institutions, schools, organizations and individuals [on] how to implement restorative justice within their schools.”
She began working with Tufts as a consultant after the university decided to invest in restorative justice and was assigned as her client. Soon, she “switched teams” to work within Tufts. She noted that Tufts is interested in these practices in a genuine way.
“Tufts actually invested in restorative practices. You have universities do it all over, but I think one of the differences that I’ve experienced here at Tufts has been that the students, this faculty, they are about social justice in a way in which they can see this benefiting so many different areas,” Ashley Rose said.
For Ashley Rose, it’s important that restorative practice circles and trainings are not just held for faculty but also for students.
“When I came in initially, they wanted to just get a group of faculty folk to do [the training],” she said. “But I don’t believe in working with [just] faculty to help students. If it’s for the people, it has to be by the people.”
In opening her trainings and circle practices up to everyone, Ashley Rose said she’s had every kind of group show up — including graduate students and participants from across the political spectrum.
The topics of conversation vary widely. Ashley Rose gave the example of a student majoring in science wondering how to have a conversation about environmental justice. Other conversations have involved graduate students who feel less supported by the Tufts community because more attention is paid to the undergraduate population.
She also mentioned that the pre-orientation group, Students Heightening Actionable Political Engagement, led an exercise with first-years in which people spoke about political differences in an open manner.
“You speak, then I speak, [and we ask each other] ‘What’s one thing that you think the Democrats are right about?’ Now, you don’t know who has a different feeling and opinion,” she said. “And then it will go the opposite: ‘Is there anything you could agree with that the Republicans say?’ It was just interesting to watch them have a healthy conversation. No one bit each other’s head off.”
Provided that restorative practice circles emphasize civil, honest, open and productive dialogue, Ashley Rose said that if the current political arena had an establishment of restorative practices, “people wouldn’t be canceled without fully being heard.”
To Ashley Rose, political polarization has meant that it’s difficult for people who might not lean one way or the other to be a part of the conversation, as they have not been allowed space to speak up. She also noted that with education and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives under attack, it’s important to ground herself in the core purpose of these sorts of initiatives.
“How are we bringing people in despite their differences?” she said. “The core of DEI is bringing everyone to the table, leveling out the playing field.”
“Education is under attack — and that’s how we create the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots,’” she added. “So I think by tackling DEI the way they have, they’re trying to restructure the community in a way where those who are coming up don’t get to come up anymore.”
But it’s not just education under attack, according to Ashley Rose.
“What does poetry look like right now? And when free speech is under attack, how are you expressing yourself?” she asked.
To process emotions and stay grounded, Ashley Rose has always turned to poetry. For her, poetry is a universal form of healing across all cultures. Poetry and education intertwine with the restorative work that The Petey Greene Program at Tufts does.
“There is a restorative nature in education in the sense that [their incarceration] doesn’t define them,” Christodoulou explained. “There’s another opportunity through education. So it’s all a part of this idea of restorative justice.”
