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Articles

Facing loss: pedagogy of death

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Pages 1143-1157 | Received 13 Jul 2017, Accepted 19 Feb 2018, Published online: 02 Mar 2018
 

Abstract

Loss, impermanence, and death are facts of life difficult to face squarely. Our own mortality and that of loved ones feels painful and threatening, the mortality of the biosphere unthinkable. Consequently, we do our best to dodge these thoughts, and the current globalizing culture supports and colludes in our evasiveness. Even environmental educators tend to foreground ‘sustainability’ whilst sidelining the reality of decline, decay, and loss. And yet, human life and ecological health require experiencing ‘unsustainability’ too, and a pedagogy for life requires a pedagogy of death. In this paper we explore experiences of loss and dying in both human relationships and the natural world through four different types of death affording situations, the cemetery, caring-unto-death, sudden death, and personal mortality. We trace the confluence of death in nature and human life, and consider some pedagogical affordance within and between these experiences as an invitation to foster an honest relationship with the mortality of self, others, and nature. We end by suggesting art as an ally in this reconnaissance, which can scaffold teaching and learning and support us to courageously accept both the beauty and the ugliness that death delivers to life.

Notes

1. We use the term ‘globalising culture’ in place of terms such as ‘Western’ culture, that on the one hand erase the cultural diversity present in the Western Hemisphere, while at the same time ignoring the many contributions that diverse other cultures have made to even so-called Western society. In any case, the current globalising culture is now both the product of and cause of vast global socio-economic and technological processes.

2. In fact, TMT argues that thoughts of death are fled in two ways: by performing practices of one’s dominant culture, and increase one’s sense of self-esteem. It is easy to see that the former can lead to exacerbated ecological problems. The latter can as well, however, when one’s self-esteem generating activities are themselves destructive. Often, both are interconnected. The authors would like to thank Rick Kool for alerting us to this phenomenon (see Kool and Kelsey Citation2005).

3. Nevertheless, we suspect that although the TMT hypothesis is supported by over 300 empirical studies, it is itself a reflection of the culture it is studying and is not necessarily about the human condition writ large. While TMT has been confirmed in diverse cultural studies (Greenberg, Solomon, and Pyszczynski Citation1997), these tend to be Western countries (TMT has been verified in a few Asian studies, such as Heine, Harihara, and Niiya (Citation2002) in Japan, and Tam, Chiu, and Lau (Citation2007) in China). However, many cultures experience death routinely and process it in much more direct ways than the current globalising culture. Such cultures would have little reason to flee from thoughts of mortality where death is spoken and given space to be lived and transformed.

4. This term is not commonly used in death studies literature, which is mostly focused on ‘death education’ predominantly for nurses, doctors and other caregivers who typically deal with dying people in their professions (see, for example Wass (Citation2004)).

5. These four situations are illustrative not exhaustive. The pedagogy of death invites explorations beyond those in this paper, including facing and dealing with complicity in the death of others, addressing the fear and pain handed down through intergenerational trauma, and the physical pain of illness, each which occur within humans and in our relationship within the natural world.

6. Place-based education (Sobel Citation2004) can profit from engaging with life and death more directly. The ecological and cultural elements of a place do not merely intertwine with the socioeconomics of patriarchy and capitalism (Gruenewald Citation2003), but invariably involve existential dimensions as well. This goes well beyond merely considering the presence of death in the natural and cultural worlds around us. For example, consumerist capitalism not only increases the frequency of certain types of death (through habitat destruction, the proliferation of toxins, etc.) but also reduces our experiential engagement with death (through driving consumerism, and through creating environments devoid of death-eliciting experience). Understanding how these various elements conspire, and the tensions between them too, should give educators a platform through which to explore death in the places they work.

7. For example, in Peirce’s conception (Citation1893), agape involves the nourishing and caring for things that are still nascent. It is a particular kind of love that is concerned with bringing things into their potential.

8. We believe that this neologism, which combines Kierkegaard and Nel Noddings, describes an important and so far inadequately theorised phenomenological dimension of human experience.

9. The discussion that follows is deeply informed by the experiences of one of the authors (Ramsey) caring for both his dying parents.

10. The one cared for also often experiences powerful transformations in outlook on life, but that is obviously a different case with a different pedagogy and will not be articulated here.

11. While scientists examining this phenomenon often suggest exoplanetary factors, some posit internal ones related to the dynamics of complexity interactions in ecosystems (ex. Plotnick and McKinney Citation1993). Considering the last extinction event was about this many years ago, a controversial hypothesis might be that humans are part of a giant cycle of diversification and simplification of the biosphere. However, paleontological data supporting extinction is sketchy. In any case, the results of this investigation miss a crucial point in the debate over what is natural or unnatural, and that is its ‘scale dependence.’ From the point of view of the last 26 million years, which is also the time in which humans came into existence, global mass species extinction has never occurred. It is therefore clearly an unnatural experience for us, as much as it is for all other creatures adapted to this phase of the Earth. Humans will always need to ‘go against’ nature at one scale to protect it at another, because in the great scheme of things life (and death) are rare exceptional events in the universe, a transgression of former order that we rightly value.

12. This case emerged from conversations between the two authors where Beth shared her experience of dealing with the murder of a family member.

13. Not all who consider the differences between sudden and anticipated loss accept the existence of ‘anticipatory grief’. For example, while Parkes and Weiss (Citation1983) observe that those who face unanticipated loss have poorer recovery. They argue that this is because of the trauma of the suddenness of the loss. For them, grief only happens in response to an actual loss. To some extent, such a debate is merely semantic. Parkes and Weiss acknowledge that someone dealing with anticipating a loss recreates their identity and sense of the future, which makes it easier to go through the bereavement process when it occurs. We prefer to view anticipatory grief as real, with different aspects of loss grieved at different stages and rates. Because the dying are not merely ‘other’ people, but parts of ourselves and our worlds, the reconstruction of one’s sense of self and of the world indeed seem to be the grieving and readjustment to loss.

14. See Klein (Citation2007) exposition of how capitalism exploits trauma. Whilst she does not (as far as we know) consider the particular linkages between environmental-crisis induced terror and the exploitation of vulnerability, this seems an analogical extension of her argument.

15. How Deweyan, for example, is Walter Benjamin’s observation: ‘[w]as it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battle-field grown silent—not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?’ (Citation2016).

16. This image is widely attributed to an article by Ann Lamott that is not currently accessible online.

17. For Heidegger, ‘Dasein’ is the technical term for this sort of conscious being, a being for whom their own being is a question.

18. It is not suggested that these two cases are directly analogous. In particular, Heidegger’s dichotomy between the free individual being-towards-death and the inauthenticity of the distracting ‘herd’ breaks down when the threat is a collective one. A second difference is (hopefully) that ecological death is avoidable whereas individual death is not.

19. In the final editing stages of this paper, it came to our attention that David Greenwood has been exploring literature as a way of engaging with death in environmental education (Greenwood and McKee Citationin press).

20. The soul of time can be felt in differently throughout life ways at different stages of our lives. For one of us (Beth), the passage of time was starkly felt in a doubly literal sense when she gave birth to her son and instantly became a mother, and her mother a grandmother. In a flash, it seemed as though everything had suddenly jumped forward, the spinning wheel of the world skipping to a new stage -and one with death much closer on the horizon.

21. Zwicky desribes it in a 2005 Lecture at the Royal Ontario Museum that is sadly no longer online.

22. Discussions since Hume (Citation1874) have explored the reason behind the so-called ‘paradox of tragedy,’ the contradiction between the fact that humans avoid negative emotions and yet seek out negative experiences in art such as tragedies.

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