Early World Literature: A Restorative Justice Approach

This is an Open Educational Resource (OER) book. It is available for all to use. Please feel free to use all of it or take what helps you most (we only ask for attribution). We see ourselves as part of a community of teachers and learners that want to make education more accessible to our students. It is because we are committed to the idea that teaching and learning is a community effort that we take advantage of the many resources available to us in OER, with attribution of course.

There’s plenty of evidence that shows that students do better in courses in which faculty have created and/or use open resources. The reasons for this are many and multifaceted but one of them is the belief that access to educational materials should not be a barrier to education. We are in awe of the people that take on this work and we are proud to join in this endeavor.

Also know that this book is not the first OER book on Early World Literature and we often link to those resources here. This might lead to the question: why another OER book on World Literature? Our answer is that we want to introduce a new approach to teaching literature in general, and world literature in particular. We use the concept of Restorative Justice as a guiding principle.

This book relies on Restorative Justice (RJ) and anti-racist pedagogical frameworks to teach Early World Literatures. We begin with the premise that we need community to feel heard, we need community to be empowered, and we need community to want forgiveness and accountability.

Restorative Justice provides a different perspective to conflict resolution than what we often prioritize in our classrooms. In the context of Early World Literature, an entry level college course, RJ encourages us to consider why it is that the communities that created these texts found them so appealing and why it is that our modern communities continue to find them important. The answers vary from text to text: humans err and can make mistakes (Gilgamesh), storytelling creates healing and everyone deserves a chance at redemption (A Thousand and One Nights, also known as The Arabian Nights), poetry creates transtemporal solidarity by evoking similar feelings in past as well as present-day readers (poetry of the Tang period).

As an Open Educational Resource (OER) book, we see ourselves as part of a community of teachers and learners that want to make education more accessible to our students. Restorative Justice is all around us.