Lauren Fardig-Diop
Teach Blue Fellow
Education begins with and builds lifelong relationships, and is rooted in equity at heart: that each person can know, can grow, can become their best self in community with others. We need each other, and rely on each other to keep learning and growing.
Problem of Practice
Schools say they have “restorative justice” programs—but often lack the skills and training to effectively facilitate school-wide culture that resists punitive measures and sees students as humans with agency.
About Lauren Fardig-Diop
Lauren Fardig-Diop taught high school English in Ypsilanti, Detroit, Ann Arbor (where she was raised) and NYC for 17 years. She has been a school-based restorative justice practitioner since 2010, when she began working with United Playaz at Banana Kelly High School in the Bronx, NY. We considered, with youth leading the conversation, how to interrupt violence we were seeing on the streets in the South Bronx, that claimed the lives of our loved ones. Then, she served as the Restorative Justice Coordinator for the Bronx Academy of Letters, where she grew her practice into training educators, and young people on using circles and RJ/TJ practices to interrupt violence at school, at home and in the community. She recently closed her teaching career at ACCE High School in Ypsilanti, and is the Program Manager for the Metro Detroit Restorative Justice Network.
Circle keeping is an Indigenous process rooted in dignity, respect, compassion and humanity. She has been honored to hold space in hundreds of circles and was deeply honored to have been one of the trainers for DJC’s Community Circlekeeper training from 2023–24. She believes that we have the tools we need for our collective liberation, and we need to listen to our young people, our returning citizens, and our elders when crafting policy and programming. She is a mama, a community mama, a poet and a lifelong student.
Her work has been featured in Humans of Restorative Justice, The Atlantic, The New York Times and on the PBS NewsHour. She is also the 2022 LaFontaine Teacher of the Year for Washtenaw County, a 2022 Writer of Ypsilanti and a 2022-25 Vocal Justice Teaching Fellow. She is an alumnus of the Secondary MAC program ('08) at the Marsal Family School of Education, receiving her Masters in Education.
Accounts from Lauren Fardig-Diop
Schools have a long history of flawed systems of justice with failed results, mirroring our wider society. What if we broke out of the institutional mindset and looked to Indigenous philosophies to inform Restorative Justice alternatives?
We know that traditional models of punishment are ineffective. Authentic Restorative Justice works, so how can we help schools adopt it?