Document Type
Presentation
Publication Date
Summer 6-16-2025
Recommended Citation
Basch, Averie and Nahir I. Otaño Gracia. "OER, Restorative Justice, and the Classroom: Restorative Justice as Pedagogy." (2025). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/oer_at_tech_days/3
COinS
Comments
Presentation Abstract: This presentation will discuss our aims and difficulties in building an OER book to teach World Literature I through a Restorative Justice approach. We will discuss our process in putting together the book, our teaching frame work, and the pedagogy behind it. We will define world literature, restorative justice and how these themes come together in the classroom. We will also discuss strategies to use restorative justice beyond a literature classroom.
Presenter & Picture: Nahir I. Otaño Gracia; Assistant Professor of English; First author of OER Book Early World Literature: A Restorative Justice Approach
Presenter Bio: Nahir Otaño Gracia is an Assistant Professor of English. Her theoretical frameworks include translation theory and practice, the global North Atlantic (Britain, Iberia, and Scandinavia), and critical identity studies. She has published a number of essays as well as the book The Other Faces of Arthur: Chivalric Whiteness in the Global North Atlantic with Penn Press (April 2025). Her co-edited volume of essays, Women’s Lives: Self-Representation, Reception, and Appropriation in the Middle Ages, was published in 2023.
Recently, Nahir has taught courses such as Intro to World Literature: On Hate and Restorative Justice and Medieval Romance and Race. Her courses tend to cluster canonical works of literature, transgressive literature by women of color, and materials from popular culture that students already know and welcome in order to help students decenter, dismantle, and recreate the canon.
Nahir is also an activist medievalist working to create a more inclusive medieval studies.
Presenter & Picture: Averie Basch, Research Graduate Assistant; Second author of OER Book Early World Literature: A Restorative Justice Approach
Presenter Bio: Averie Basch is a second-year doctoral student at the University of New Mexico pursuing a degree in Medieval Studies. She focuses on Arthuriana, Celtic mythology, and Otherworlds. She takes great interest in the how Arthurian literature reveals interactions between the Christianized North Atlantic and the Celtic fringe and how the Pre-Christian traditions survived in converted communities through storytelling. Much of her work assesses how the liminal spaces portrayed through the literature reflect borderlands in geographic and cultural contexts.