How Grief Camp Reinforces the Need for Death Education in Elementary Schools

Abstract: Established to help normalize the grieving process (Schuurman & Decristofaro, 2010), grief camps are traditionally for children and adolescents who have experienced a death-related loss. These camps take children and adolescents out of their daily environment, inviting them to express their grief in innovative and developmentally appropriate ways (Christ, 2000; Koocher, 1973; Laing & Moules, 2015; Neimeyer & Currier, 2009; O’Connor, 2002-2003; Schuurman & Decristofaro, 2010; Tonkins & Lambert, 1996). I am a volunteer at two grief camps in Manitoba and it is apparent that these camps not only fill a gap in the bereavement experiences of children and adolescents, but also highlight the need for more preparation in terms of dying, death, and loss. Pupils in Ontario spend almost 6,000 hours in elementary school (OECD, 2014), yet there is no curriculum that directly addresses death. As a microcosm, grief camp reinforces the need for death education on a macro level in elementary schools.

Yearning to learn: a pandemic-inspired approach to grief literacy

The COVID-19 global pandemic exacerbated and altered death- and non-death-related loss, insisting that grief and bereavement adhere to protocols that were unfamiliar and sometimes even prohibitive to moving forward in a healthy manner. As a dying, death, and loss educator who explores grief using applied theatre methods with children and adolescents, I responded to this recommendation by contemplating safe and novel ways to provide acute support within these new and uncertain parameters. To meet the long-term needs of the bereaved, development of grief literacy was recommended (Breen et al., 2022). When my beloved uncle Chris died unexpectedly on May 17th, 2020, I grappled to negotiate my own pandemic-restricted grief. This caused me personal and professional angst: if I, with the appropriate tools and strategies at hand, was struggling, how was I ever going to be capable of holding space for others? I yearned to learn how to grieve in this new realm to subsequently hold space for others and enrolled in an online workshop to learn about digital storytelling. This autoethnographic study examined my own pandemic-restricted grief experience through the digital storytelling workshop’s process and product (digital story) as well ascertaining its applicability in my applied theatre praxis within dying, death, and loss education. [...