“While Faughey does offer a timely and well-structured guide for bringing students ‘back’ from the pandemic, she also weaves a powerful thread throughout the book as she reveals critical pathways for ensuring that systemically marginalized students feel valued and empowered in a school environment.”
—Teachers College Record
“In Deirdre Faughey’s Restorative Literary Practices: Cultivating Community in the Secondary ELA Classroom, we meet a veteran high-school teaching colleague who has experimented with respectful teaching that looks unflinchingly at the messy state of English language arts, and turns it into an opportunity for vastly more advanced and motivated learning.”
—From the Foreword by Ken Lindblom, professor, Stony Brook University
“In this deeply profound era of racial reckoning, literacy teachers must strengthen the ways our increasingly diverse classrooms can become places of socially just and restorative literacy practices. To that end, in this compelling and innovative text, Deirdre Faughey draws on her considerable teaching experience to offer compassionate and creative approaches to literacy instruction. Let’s follow her example to, as she writes, ‘change the trajectory for students who have historically been pushed out of classrooms rather than welcomed in.’”
—Deborah Appleman, Hollis L. Caswell Professor of Educational Studies, Carleton College, and author, Critical Encounters in High School English: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents
“Restorative Literacy Practices is truly a must-read for any teacher navigating the many tensions that diverse students and educators face today. Faughey’s engaging and personal approach is both theoretically grounded and completely practical. Few teacher researchers achieve the scholarly accessibility and authenticity woven into her narrative, fostering a stance that supports teachers’ autonomy and centers students’ voices.”
—Limarys Caraballo, associate professor, Teachers College, Columbia University
“Restorative Literacy Practices is a book for our times. In rethinking and revising her teaching practice to focus explicitly on valuing students’ experiences and ways of knowing, Deirdre Faughey not only honors her students’ various identities and concerns but serves as an exemplary model of teacher learning and development. Along the way, she develops new ‘humanizing’ lessons, assessments, and classroom structures that are restorative to the many students who are often marginalized in our schools and far more authentic and valued ways of reading, writing, and speaking in the world outside of school. The result is a master lesson in how to deepen students’ relationship to texts, their classroom and school communities, and the process of learning itself.”
—Jonna Perrillo, professor, The University of Texas at El Paso
“Here at last is a book by a caring teacher and teacher educator who guides her students and readers to experience restorative literacy practices in action. Deirdre Faughey is a teacher, learner, ethnographer, participant-observer, and action researcher with a keen eye for the people and dynamics in the English language arts classroom. We can teach with grace, love, and mercy as hope beckons and restores us in each living chapter. We must bow as we read.”
—R. Joseph Rodríguez, St. Edward's University
