In this article, the author discusses how her mother's death uncovers the implications of how people do not deal with grief in higher education, as well as what that means about the work alongside students and each other.

Given the legacy of John Bowlby, Attachment theory has often portrayed separation from a caregiver as likely to provoke protest, despair, and ultimately detachment in infants and young children. Indeed, the emotional challenge of separation is built into a key measurement tool of Attachment theory, the Strange Situation. However, James Robertson,…

Human geographers engage students in learning about a world characterized by environmental and social disarray. It follows that our students are exposed to deeply confronting topics: climate change, global inequality, food insecurity, and racism, to name a few. Prompted by scholarly debate on the effects of painful emotions elicited by public…

Grief is a complicated equalizer and a personal reaction to loss. Losing a loved one is a universal experience, but fear keeps grief quiet and misunderstood. When teachers not trained in death education, it can affect children's grieving process. When grief is not processed in a healthy way, the parasympathetic nervous system is activated,…

In this paper I call for an emotional confrontation with our traumatic, racist, and often unacknowledged history. I share ideas, experiences, and pedagogical strategies with which to engage difficult dialogue about difficult knowledge, in such a way as to disarm defense and, potentially inspire anti-racist activism in education and beyond. The…

Nearly every teacher will experience loss and grief during their years in the classroom. And yet, too often the profession assumes that English language arts (ELA) teachers must hide the emotions that accompany loss. In this article the authors share strategies for supporting English teachers in making sense of their grieving experiences and…

This research ethics article focuses on an unexpected finding from my Master's thesis examining bereaved participants' experiences of taking part in sensitive qualitative research: some participants wanted their real names used in my written dissertation and any subsequent empirical publications. While conducting interviews for my thesis and…

This report describes results from a survey designed to assess students' emotions and behaviors prior to and following their participation in targeted grief support counseling.

Educators in many Western nations have used the Kübler-Ross stage model of grief for five decades as a lens to explain parental response to disability. A recent article in "Improving Schools," representing this deficit model, asserted that the grief lens is useful in understanding parent's response to learning that their child qualified…

This paper reads Roger Simon's concept of "transactional memory" in relationship to D. W. Winnicott's theory of "transitional space" to examine the emotional dimensions of making historical significance. Drawing on a personal memory of archival study with Simon, I suggest that his attention to the ethical qualities of…

This paper is a re-reading of Freud's classic paper. The themes of mourning and melancholia are viewed in relation to children and adolescents with illustrations from case histories. Mourning is interpreted in a broader sense: not only as grief (both expectable and traumatic) but as a response to the developmental process itself as phases of…

Whether stemming from dysfunctional families, abuse, emotional responses to societal violence, the threat of terrorism, school shootings, or escaping the day-to-day tedium that life places before us, today's learners are vulnerable to loss and the grief, sorrow, depression, and anger that accompany such loss. This essay, written from the lead…

The article explores a sociological perspective on grief as a social emotion. Focusing on the social bond with the deceased, the self-concept of the survivor or the power of feeling rules, general sociological theories of emotions (symbolic interactionism, structural theory, behavioral theory) have the potential to deepen the understanding of…

The purpose of study was to explore the change process described in "The Shack" using Mezirow's (1997) phases of meaning-making in transformational learning. Results suggest that transformational learning is a useful lens for examining the individual change process in the novel, and offers teaching opportunities in classes that explore personal…

Author Carol Thomas was formerly a school counselor and is now a therapist in private practice specializing in work with adolescents. She says she has always been interested in learning how to best provide support to grieving teens. In this article, Dr. Thomas interviews Ms. Wendy Littner Thomson, the Bereavement Coordinator and Counselor at St.…