Offering Cempasúchil: Grief Pedagogies for Ourselves and Our Students

• In Event: Offerings of Love and Accountability: Cultivating Empathy Through Loss and Grief

Abstract

Harrod Buhner (2022) argues that the way we approach and write about grief in disembodied ways is not just a reflection of how grief-averse we are as a society but of a part of the underlying problem in grief and healing research. In short, we cannot heal from grief simply by writing about it, we must be willing to feel it, and we must write about it in a way that honors and embodies that feeling. It is for this reason that in this paper, I opt to draw on autoethnography (Alexander, 2005) and portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) to share a self-portrait (e.g., Cariaga, 2019; Valdez, 2020) of my own apprenticeship with sorrow (Weller, 2015), specifically from March through December of 2020, when I was inarguably drowning in a sea of what felt like never-ending loss.

I return to this period of time for several reasons, most notably, that this period changed who I am as an educator and informed my pedagogy and praxis in ways that I believe are instructive for other educators. In line with portraiture, I draw on my impressionistic record which is comprised of ethnographic observations, journal entries, photographs, photographs of self (aka selfies), lesson plans, and student evaluations to construct a self-portrait that explores how I sought to make space for the grief of my teacher education students AND my own.

While grief has long been a sacred practice for Communities of Color, the COVID-19 pandemic has served to illuminate the importance of creating spaces for grief and healing in schools. This is largely due to the over one million people who have died as a result of COVID-19 (Center for Disease Control, 2022) that resulted in 140,000 children losing a primary parent or caregiver between April 2020 and June 2021 (Hillis et al., 2021). However staggering these numbers may be, when we expand current definitions of trauma and grief to account for the myriad of losses we experience—safety, self, dignity, health, loved ones, land, and more—(Weller, 2015), it is likely that these numbers would grow exponentially. Moreover, when we look at the data and definitions through the lens of race and ethnicity, People of Color bear the burden disproportionately and have long been navigating grief as a result of structural violence. There is an urgency to develop grief pedagogies and practices for our classrooms.

Drawing on lesson plans, PowerPoint presentations, ethnographic field notes, student evaluations, assignments, and student pláticas (Author, 2023), I offer some of the most notable ways my students and I centered our grief in ways that led to collective healing. In sharing our losses, we are reminded that despite our grief—we are not alone, and when we lean into our grief together, we can alchemize this sorrow towards our collective grieving, healing, organizing, love, learning, and liberation.

Author

• Sharim Hannegan-Martinez, University of Michigan