This page hosts materials related to memorialization and commemoration. These resources are intended to help guide your school crisis leadership through school crisis recovery, as mourning and remembrance are one of its key pillars. Access materials across several of our events that offer resources and learning on leading memorials and commemorations.
The resources provided are sourced from the field (practitioners and scholars), SCRR staff, content from our Wading through Grief and Time Community of Practice, Memorialization and Commemoration: Navigating, Creating, and Holding Space in Our Schools After Loss, Life After Loss Tables: The Educators Edition, and other related sources to guide us.
Quick Links to Key Sections on this Page
- SCRR Resources for Educators & School Leaders Exploring Memorialization and Commemoration
- Resource List: Memorialization, Commemoration, and Recovery & Renewal
- Memorialization and Commemoration: Navigating, Creating and Holding Space for Loss in Our Schools (May 2021)
- “Wading through Grief and Time” Community of Practice (Fall 2021)
- Life After Loss Tables: The Educators Edition (A joint project of the School Crisis Recovery & Renewal project and The Dinner Party)
Memorialization and Commemoration: What does it mean?
How do educators and school site leaders navigate memorials and lead schools in grief and healing?
In May 2021, SCRR hosted two learning forums on memorialization and commemoration, centering educator and school site leaders’ voices of experience. During that programming, we heard that folks wanted space to discuss the intricacies of memorialization and commemoration in the context of school crisis recovery and renewal. In response, in September 2021, we organized that space and invited District and School-site Leaders, K-12 Educators, School-based Mental Health Professionals, Student Support Staff, and more into “Wading Through Grief and Time”, a 5-session learning community.
In those sessions, our own resources, and the third-party materials uplifted below, we explore the questions:
- How might educators navigate the concurrent experiences of present and past loss for themselves and their students?
- How might our definitions of healing and wholeness impact our ability to grow beyond the paralysis of grief and loss?
- How might honoring the cultural traditions of our school communities support the memorialization and commemoration for students and educators?
- How might school leaders create spaces for joy and celebration within spaces of grief?
These resources will hopefully support you in navigating the delicate and complex work of tending to grief within a school setting. Particularly with resources that center trauma-informed leadership embedded in the emerging work of commemoration and memorialization as means towards building humanizing and healing-centered school communities.
SCRR Resources for Educators & School Leaders Exploring Memorialization and Commemoration
Our Right to Grieve: Grief-Informed Recommendations and Resources for Healing-Centered & Racially-Just School Cultures (2023)
This resource highlights the consensually offered learnings gathered from “Right to Grieve,” a field-based program conducted in 2022.
Creating and Holding Space for Ourselves and Each Other After Student Death (2023)
This 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.
Creating the Container: Designing Collective Rituals to Metabolize Grief Together as a School, Team, Community and Culture (2023)
This is a worksheet born out of our “Life After Loss Tables,” series and our workshop “Creating the Container for Us: How to Hold Space for Ourselves & Each Other After Student Death,” and may be used to support you in creating space for your community to process student death and loss.
Trauma-Informed COVID-19 Leadership Practice Guide For Recovery And Renewal (2021)
A practice guide to support your trauma-informed COVID-19 leadership to help your school communities towards recovery & renewal.
Ritualizing Remembrance in our School Cultures: Día de los muertos (2021)
This resource was developed to support learners in our “Honoring Grief in our Classrooms” Community of Practice as a guide to co-constructing rituals and practices in your schools and communities, related to Dia De Los Muertos.
Resource List: Memorialization, Commemoration, and Recovery & Renewal
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Memorialization and Commemoration: Navigating, Creating and Holding Space for Loss in Our Schools (May 2021)
“Memorialization and Commemoration: Navigating, Creating, and Holding Space in Our Schools After Loss” (May 2021) was a two-part learning experience during which panelists and participants surfaced the challenges, complexities, and experiences of commemorating and memorializing crisis, trauma, death, as well as joy, recovery, and growth in and with our school communities.
Materials and Resources
Learning Capture from Memorialization and Commemoration Part 1: Discourse on May 13, 2021
“Wading through Grief and Time” Community of Practice (Fall 2021)
How do educators and school site leaders navigate memorials and lead schools in grief and healing?
In May 2021, SCRR hosted two learning forums on memorialization and commemoration, centering educator and school site leaders’ voices of experience. During that programming, we heard that folks wanted space to discuss the intricacies of memorialization and commemoration in the context of school crisis recovery and renewal.
This 5-session learning community was created to integrate lessons of trauma-informed leadership into the emerging work of commemoration and memorialization as means towards building humanizing and healing-centered school communities.
District and school-site leaders, k-12 educators, school-based mental health professionals, and student support staff joined us for a discussion about navigating the delicate and complex work of tending to grief within a school setting.
Community of Practice Materials and Resources
2021 – Session 1: Community of Practice Introduction
2021 – Session 2: Navigating Loss in the Past & Present
2021 – Session 3: Healing and Wholeness
2021 – Session 4: Honoring Ancestors: Cultural Traditions in an Education Environment
2021 – Session 5: Space for Joy
Life After Loss Tables: The Educators Edition
(A joint project of the School Crisis Recovery & Renewal project and The Dinner Party)
How might the experience of student death years ago impact your current practice? How might we make sense of school-based loss and how that informs who we are as administrators, educators, clinicians, and youth advocates? How might we incorporate the losses we experienced as students ourselves, now that we are educators-perhaps even in the same community in which we grew up?
These questions sparked and informed “Life After Loss Tables: The Educators Edition,” a partner project by The School Crisis Recovery & Renewal (SCRR) project and The Dinner Party. This 5-month program was intentional, peer-led space for educators to engage in conversation around their experience with death-related, school-based losses as a means towards healing. Educators connected and shared about what it means to teach, lead school sites or systems, and provide school services after the death of a student or alum.
Throughout and after that pilot programming, the feedback we got was consistent, and the results were powerful: Educators who’d felt alone suddenly had a community of peers, and permission to open up about a subject that’s talked about in hushed tones, if it’s talked about at all. So, we launched the first cohort of Life After Loss: Educations Edition Table Hosts. The inaugural cohort of hosts were trained on how to hold space for educators to connect and share about what it means to teach, lead school sites or systems, and provide school services after the death of a student or alum.
Interested in holding space for grief and the grief of others? Learn more here.
Creating and Holding Space for Ourselves and Each Other After Student Death (2023)
This 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.
Thank you to all of our Memorialization and Commemoration Faculty and Partners
- Alex Shevrin Venet, educator, author, and professional development facilitator
- Alica Forneret, SCRR Pedagogy of Grief Content Strategies & Founder and Executive Director of PAUSE
- Beth Silbergeld, educator, school leader, equity consultant
- Dr. Christina “V” Villareal, Faculty Director of Teacher Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education
- Francesca Osuana, MSW/MPH, PPSC, Former SCRR Field Coach
- Lennon Flowers, Co-founder & Executive Director of The Dinner Party
- Mary Horn, Director of The Dinner Party
- Oriana Ides, MA, LPCCI, PPS, SCRR Field Coach
- shea martin, writer, educator, and co-founder of Liberate and Chill *Collective
- Tiffani Marie, educator and researcher
- Yesmina Luchsinger, MS, educator, advocate, and mental health professional