Learning through Loss: Utilizing the Power of Freewriting as a Crisis Recovery Tool for Educators

“We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded,” begins a resonant quote by author Natalie Goldberg in her book Writing Down the Bones. She continues:

This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn’t matter. . . Recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp’s half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter… Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist – the real truth of who we are (p.55, 1986).

On a Friday during the summer of 2022, eight practitioners from the education, social service, and mental health fields gathered through Zoom for a grief writing workshop. Freewriting allows us to explore that ‘real truth of who we are,’” I shared with them. Coming together from all corners of the country and world (with one dedicated writer joining at one o’clock in the morning), participants in the School Crisis Recovery & Renewal project’s Learning through Loss Writers Workshop entered and cultivated our online community to engage in an hour and a half of guided freewriting and discussion geared toward exploring, understanding, and sharing stories of personal loss as well as the ways in which grief impacts and orients our various approaches to youth work. 

We began our time together by building community through verbal introductions, introducing ourselves; the ways in which we work with young people; one word to describe how we were feeling as we entered the space (an emotional “temperature check” that is also a useful tool to employ when working with youth, normalizing and routinizing metacognitive reflection on internal experience); and, finally, sharing one “community agreement” participants would like the group to keep in mind as we bore witness to one another’s stories and held space for reflection–a collaborative design framework that elicited responses such as, “Be open,” “Honor vulnerability,” and “Respect confidentiality,” a message that I sought to highlight and reinforce through reminders of the SCRR commitment to “contextual confidentiality,” the idea that participants may speak about their experience being in community with fellow writers without sharing details of specific stories heard or read to protect the inherent vulnerability of storytelling. 

“Writing,” I shared with participants, “is a vulnerable act. An act of resistance. An act of self-care. An act of connection.”

After grounding ourselves in the space, we discussed the psychological science supporting the holistic benefits of “expressive writing,” or free-writing that utilizes emotion words. For example, James Pennebaker, Ph.D., has uncovered empirical evidence suggesting that engagement in routine expressive writing supports psychological wellbeing as well as improved liver and immune function (for more on this science, see here), especially in times of loss or stress. The Learning through Loss workshop, participants were reminded, was designed for educators to explore their own experiences (a number of participants shared in their introductions that committing to this workshop meant “making time for [themselves]”); the workshop was not necessarily designed to replicate with students, though practices such as expressive writing are easily transferable to work with colleagues and young people. 

To warm up their writing muscles, participants engaged in five minutes of unprompted, open-ended freewriting. The point of freewriting, I shared, is to get “as intimate as possible with our inner monologue,” to pay attention to every word as it enters our mind, and to stay with the flow of our thoughts (even if those thoughts are “I’m not sure what to write right now”). Freewriting invites us to dispel our inner editor, to move away from crafted writing, and to tune in, metacognitively, to our thoughts and feelings as they arise. At the close of this introductory warm-up, I shared in five-minute intervals a number of prompts inviting participants to reflect on their own relationships to loss, their own experiences with grief, connection, and support; their relationship to the concept of “safety”; their needs in times of grief; and their thoughts, feelings, and memories in relation to how/in what ways loss has entered their learning spaces or other professional contexts. 

At the halfway mark, participants were invited to engage on a “challenge by choice basis” in small-group breakout discussions in which they were invited to spend ten minutes sharing open reflections–a line from a free write, a full prompt response, a summary of their writing experience, a reflection or thought or question that the workshop was bringing up for them–with their peers. Discussions created opportunities to practice active listening and the vulnerable risk-taking of storytelling as writers spoke about their own loss experiences and observations about how individuals, communities, and societies treat the topics of grief and mortality. 

At the close of our time together, participants were invited into a space of group-wide open reflection in which they spoke about their writing experiences.

The writing workshop “provided me a space to reflect in a purposeful way, an outlet for my own grief that comes from working with bereaved youth,” one participant shared. Another offered that writing “provided me with complemplative time for self-care,” and a third reflected that by putting “feelings and thoughts freely” onto paper, the process can “bring up things that need attention.”

By writing and workshopping together, we made connections to pedagogical practices, shared resources for grief-responsive teaching and youth work; swapped strategies for using freewriting and emotional “temperature checks” with youth; shared appreciation for, and made connections between, one another’s stories and ideas. 

Above all, this community of educator writers expressed motivations to carve out opportunities for continuing their freewriting practice to further continue their crisis recovery – a conversation ignited by our final writing prompt:

“Audre Lorde writes in A Burst of Light: And Other Essays,
‘Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.’ What does this quote mean to you? In what ways is self-care subversive and healing in the face of often systemic grief? How do you tend to your wellbeing, and how can you do so more often?”

Now that you, reader, sit with this prompt, we invite you to engage with it, too.