There is no shortage of individual and collective grief in our schools, and educators have borne an enormous share. We partnered with The Dinner Party Labs to create “Creating and Holding Space for Ourselves and Each Other After Student Death”, a guide to processing, meaning-making, and integration as educators for our collective recovery and renewal.
This guide is the product of more than two years of efforts to create intentional, peer-led spaces for educators to engage in conversation around their experience with death-related, school-based losses as a means towards healing.
“Creating and Holding Space for Ourselves and Each Other After Student Death” is designed for educators who wish to grow their skills, knowledge, and practice when it comes to talking openly about loss. We offer a series of reflection exercises, principles, and practices that will lead you toward collective healing, all to help educators explore the impact of student death and other school-based crises, and to integrate those experiences into their personal and professional development.
The guide is divided into two parts:
- We begin with an overview of grief and the paradoxes that attend it, along with the particular impacts of student loss on educators and school communities. We examine the causes and consequences of grief bias, and the need to set up conversations that honor and protect those who have been harmed most by injustice.
- We then turn to the art of holding space: how to notice and name what you have capacity for, learning to sit with discomfort — be it your own or that of a grieving friend or colleague, how to ask good questions, and group facilitation strategies to create and maintain a safe space.
We invite you to utilize this tool to enhance your ability to hold space safely, collaboratively, and in a way that will make-meaning in the midst of crises and overwhelmingly challenging experiences.