This resource library is for educators who want to move away from collective punishment but feel overwhelmed by what to do instead. You deserve support. Your instincts toward fairness are sound. There is a better way—and you don’t have to find it alone. Also see: FAQs.
Resources
These tools offer clear, practical, emotionally grounded alternatives that honour both student dignity and teacher capacity.
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Flourishing as an ethical imperative
Like many of you, I caught CBC’s Ideas episode the other day, where philosopher Angie Hobbs spoke about the ancient Greek concept of eudaimonia—a term sometimes translated as happiness or…
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Thriving beyond survival: neurodivergence, environment, and disability justice
Every person’s ability to thrive is deeply shaped by their environment. None of us are our best self in a room starved of oxygen – in other words, even the healthiest individual…
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What looks like a reward is often a repair
When a child returns from the office with gummy worms or a cartoon, it may look like a reward—but often, it is a repair. In a system built on scarcity,…
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Non-coercive, trauma-informed alternatives to PBS/ABA in BC schools
Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) and Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) are behaviourist approaches widely used in schools to manage student behaviour. However, a growing chorus of neurodivergent advocates, educators, and researchers…
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What are we teaching them in gym?
After months of thinking about collective punishment, I was drawn to memories of my own painful experiences in gym in highschool. I reflected on the experience of our PE teacher…
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One-pager about collective punishment
If you are a teacher, a classroom assistant, a support worker, or even a school leader who still spends time in rooms with students, then you already understand how hard…
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Collective punishment in schools: How humiliation undermines emotional safety and learning
In classrooms around the world, students are sometimes punished for the misbehavior of others. One student breaks a rule, and the entire class loses a privilege. This practice – known…
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The history of this website
What began as one mother’s refusal to accept the institutional cruelty of collective punishment has grown into a vast, strategic, and emotionally searing archive—a living infrastructure of truth-telling and resistance,…
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Debility is not a diagnosis: What Jasbir Puar helps us see about invisible harm in BC schools
There is a category of harm that most institutions do not name, do not track, and do not treat—because doing so would require them to admit that they caused it.…
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Why we’re tracking collective punishment across Canada
In classrooms across this country, children still lose recess for things they didn’t do. Field trips are cancelled because someone else acted out. Privileges are revoked—en masse—because a teacher felt…
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On far gone conclusions and participating in a school district’s accessibility committee
You called it collaboration. We recognised the smell of extraction. The invitation: dressed in equity, padded with keywords You summoned us to assist. You issued invitations laced with keywords—barriers, co-design,…
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Barriers in the process mirror the barriers we named
We gathered to name the obstacles—but the process itself became one of them. The same systems that silence us replicated themselves in real time, even as we tried to describe…
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What collaboration really means
You cannot ask for collaboration after the structure has been built. If the goals are fixed, the roles already assigned, the rules already written, then what you are offering is…
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Introductions are an access issue
Every structure carries weight. And when you ask us to begin with a name and a smile, but offer no container for safety, you are asking us to choose between…
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We must start with an acknowledgement of harm
Before we talk about solutions, or even feelings, we must name what has been done. We begin in the wreckage When an institution convenes a committee to explore accessibility, equity,…
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Suspending justice: What ethics can (and can’t) teach us about school discipline
In 1993, educator Martha Johnson conducted a simple but telling experiment. During a professional development session for principals and vice-principals in southern Alberta, she handed out a fictional case study:…
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Fight flight fawn freeze: surviving school
There are children who throw chairs when cornered, children who slip quietly out the door or hide behind the portable, children who don’t speak for hours, who go limp, who…
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How to talk about collective punishment: a conversation guide
This guide is for anyone who wants to help shift thinking around collective punishment in schools. It includes practical, respectful ways to respond when you see or hear something troubling…
