Life After Loss Table: A space to process, make meaning, and integrate experiences of student death and loss as educators
September 2022 – December 2022
9:00 am – 10:30 am PT / 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm ET (view your time zone)
Online via Zoom
This event has passed and registration is closed.
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 the experience of student death years ago impact your current practice?
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?
Why
Educators who’d feel alone can access a community of peers, and the permission to open up about a subject that’s talked about in hushed tones, if it’s talked about at all. We believe that healing is collective, that moving forward is not the same as moving on, and that our most honest and revelatory conversations happen not in school board or faculty meetings, but in spaces that feel familiar, with people who’ve been there, too.
What
Based on The Dinner Party’s peer model, these recurring virtual gatherings (“tables”) are intentional, peer-led spaces for educators to engage in conversation around their experience with death-related, school-based losses as a means towards healing.
Join us 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.
“The fact that there was no judgment of how or why we grieved. And the instant empathy and validation. I think as we shared our almost hidden grief, we seemed to have that in common and we listened with intention to each other’s story, after holding onto ours for so many years.”
-Life After Loss Educator Edition Table Participant
Intended Audience
Any educators (current or former) who have experienced student loss and want to be in community to make meaning of that experience and how it impacts long term professional and personal identities.
Sessions
All sessions will be from 9:00 am – 10:30 am PT / 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm ET (view your time zone)
- September 29, 2022
- October 27, 2022
- November 17, 2022
- December 15, 2022
Resources (priming resources for participants)
SCRR Resources
- Memorialization and Commemoration Materials to help guide your school crisis leadership through recovery, as mourning and remembrance are a key pillar of school crisis recovery.
- School Suicide Postvention x Recovery and Renewal This page hosts materials from across our events that offer resources and learning on suicide postvention + recovery and renewal.
- SCRR Voices from the Field (BLOG) (two pieces that address “Supporting Our Recovery and Renewal Post School and Community Shootings” and four pieces that address Supporting Grief Awareness
Network and Field Resources
- Navigating the anniversary of collective trauma by Alex Shevrin Venet (Instagram: Unconditional Learning)
- Collaborating to Capture Community Resilience by Jerica Coffey and Stephanie Cariaga
- An Empty Seat in Class: Teaching and Learning After the Death of a Student by Rick Ayers
- Humanizing Grief in Higher Education: Narratives of Allyship and Hope, Edited by Nicole Sieben and Ann Shelton
- Resources | Lucine Center
- Traumatic Grief (National Child Traumatic Stress Network)
- The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and The Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller
- The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise by MartÍn Prechtel
- Grieving While Black: An Antiracist Take on Oppression and Sorrow By Breeshia Wade
- MODERN LOSS: Candid Conversation About Grief. Beginners Welcome by Rebecca Soffer and Gabrielle Birkner
- Learning from Loss by Brittany R. Collins. A Trauma-Informed Approach
Frequently Asked Questions
- What do you mean by “educator”? We define “educators” as anyone tending to the well-being of students in school based settings, serving and supporting school-aged youth. You might be an afterschool service provider, a state, district, or county school administrator, a school-based clinician, a principal, a teacher, a bus driver, a coach, or a professor or someone working in advocacy who used to teach K-12. Whatever your present-day role, you, too, are welcome here.
- What do you mean by “student loss”? We define “student” as a young person you knew or had a relationship with in any capacity, at any time. The student may have died years after they left school, and you may have been out of touch by the time of their death: the impact remains no less real. And they may have died from any cause: a car accident, illness, suicide, overdose, or violence.
- I’ve lost a student, but I don’t really identify as grieving. Is this right for me? You do not need to identify as a “griever”: In fact, many of us struggle with the word, whether that’s because we were never afforded the “right” and the space to grieve, or because the death happened years or even decades ago, and we’ve long since found ways to move forward, even as we continue to be colored by the experience in ways big and small.
- Is this a grief support group, or a form of therapy? No. These gatherings may be therapeutic, but they’re not therapy. We’re not interested in professionalizing anything, but in humanizing everything. If you yourself are a counselor or school-based social worker, remember that this is a chance to take off that hat for 90 minutes and to show up as peers, not professionals.
Addition Questions
- Is this program eligible for Continuing Education Hours (CEH)? No
- Will this offering be recorded? No
- Do I need to attend all 4 number of sessions? Join us for as many of the five table sessions as possible, with the first table session being mandatory.
- Who can I contact if I have additional questions? Email us at scrr [at] cars-rp.org with “Life After Loss Table” in the subject line.
LALT Facilitator
Oriana Ides (she/hers), MA, LPCCI, PPS, is an SCRR Field Coach who approaches healing the wounds of trauma and oppression as core elements of social justice. She has worked with young people across life courses from elementary school to college, and has served as teacher-leader, school counselor, classroom educator and program director. She is committed to generating equity within school structures and policies by focusing on evidence-based mental health techniques and institutional design. Her work to forge a more just world is motivated by and dedicated to Amilca Ysabel Mouton Fuentes.
