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"If children were allowed to externalize pain, anger, and guilt, they would love to go to school."
--Elizabeth Kuebler Ross

"I believe that it is not effective or responsible to teach on a day to day basis as though nothing that happens outside of the school building impacts on the act of teaching.... Instead of wishing for other students, let us gear our work towards the students we have."
--J. Alleyne Johnson

Introduction

Emotional loss is not a subject most teachers consider when they go into teaching; it seems better suited to counselors or parents. Teachers want to inspire a love of nature, mathematics, history, literature, and art. They want to empower students with basic skills and to provide a structure in which that learning can take place.

The fact is that children and adolescents bring their lives with them into the classroom. Where there has been a death in the family, that death is present in the classroom. Where there is child abuse, that abuse is present in the emotional mind and body of the child. When a child is new in the school, they are mourning the friends, classroom community and neighborhood they left behind. When someone a child has known is killed in an accident or by violence, or parents are going through a divorce, those experiences are brought into the classroom and into the conversations and behavior between children.

It is my observation that most teachers are acutely aware of the undeniable presence of grief and loss in the classroom, but often feel unprepared and uncomfortable addressing grief with individual children, let alone the entire class. In my own experience student teaching a multi-age 4th/5th class in an ethnically and socio-economically diverse school, I struggled, often in vain, against student behavior that I knew to be related to personal losses. I sought to inspire a love of the planet and a curiosity about society and history, and we came right up against the grief that comes with knowledge of destruction, racism, and violence. I resolved to create a curriculum that would empower me and other teachers to address grief in the classroom in useful and responsible ways.

This literature review is the first step in my personal quest to design and advocate for curriculum that validates students' experiences of grief in ways that can help students establish healthy grieving behaviors so that they may be empowered to grow through loss experiences throughout their lives.

I discovered that current psychological and educational research offers a powerful argument for addressing grief, loss, and death in the classroom. The order of the sections is designed so that the reader is exposed in the very beginning to some of the most current insights about human grief and adaptation to loss. The context created by these ideas should enhance the reader's understanding as material in subsequent sections is encountered. This literature review addresses the following:

Table of Contents