What we expected and did not get
Grief, loss, and teaching
I have been working on my second manuscript for the better part of a year. It is not the book I expected to write, or a topic I would ever have thought myself capable of embracing. But that isn’t how creativity works, how writing works, or how grief works. My intention is, hopefully, to submit the finished piece for publication but it feels too important to wait that long, so I am going to release pieces of it here.
Writing this has been one of the hardest tasks I have ever accepted. Writing Building was hard, but in a different way, a more technical “how do you write a book on a topic that doesn’t exist yet?” kind of way. But the vastness of grief in education, perhaps in all of our systems and institutions, is beyond anything I anticipated. Touching even the edges of its immensity has broken my heart over over over over
The pieces I am offering are still in process. Beyond fixing any egregious spelling/grammar and removing personal notes, they will remain unedited until I finish the final piece. Once I have a piece in a shape I think will hold, I don’t come back to it until the entire project is complete, so whatever I post here will likely change.
However many or few of you read this, thank you for sharing your time with me.
Introduction
I have been thinking about grief, its omnipresence in education. Education, as an entity, is witness, party, and monument to grief. There is an extraordinary, unimaginable weight of grief contained in our institution, but we have taught ourselves to refute its presence, even as we drown in its ocean. Our unwillingness, our inability to say ‘yes’ to its existence becomes our inability to say ‘no’ to harming ourselves, our students, our colleagues, our communities, and our planet.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no public conversation about the existence of grief in education.
Education teaches us facts, dates, names. We learn how to simplify, to reduce and balance the equations of conflict. We immerse ourselves and our students in literary masterpieces of wars, battles, atrocities, genocide, land wounding; we consume the full spectrum of intimate and public violence. We gorge on centuries of our brutal past and violent present, forgetting that we are what we eat, caught in the grief-strung patterns of history.
Our schools reinforce the need for intellectualization, memorization, recitation, as if intellect alone were sufficient for meaning-making. The emotional and physical connections so necessary for learning to sink into our psyche, our soul, are ignored or rejected. We accumulate clusters of facts; data points etched on the surface of our being, uncoupled from more potent connection. Even our scholarly language has evolved to protect us from the emotional, physical, and spiritual impacts of what we might learn, what violence and loss we might encounter.
Institutions of education – public, private, primary, secondary, post-secondary, secular, religious, military, and civilian – all are tasked with observing and recording events, interpreting meaning, analyzing impacts, handling knowledge in hundreds of other ways. Teachers in all disciplines, researchers, scholars, practitioners, student services and support, counselors, management and administrators, facilities staff, everyone – we are all part of these institutions.
We bear witness, we sustain these systems with hearts, minds, and bodies. We hold what has happened, what is happening now, and what might happen. We hold knowledge of the brutality and violence done elsewhere, as well as our own experiences of educational violence. We bear the weight of expectation for what education COULD be, as well as the cultural and societal disappointment and rage with what it IS.
What we have not done is begun to engage with the living body of grief that inhabits our system of education. How could we? How do we contemplate the enormity of loss and suffering that permeates education?
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