A Pedagogy for Life and Death

• In Event: 43.009 - Curriculum, Life, Death: Theological Genuflection and Inflections

Abstract

This paper explores the historical Japanese roots and contemporary global developments in sōka, or “value-creating,” pedagogy as a means of confronting and understanding death and appreciating life. The current moment is marked by increasingly commonplace gun violence in schools, rising suicide rates (particularly among females), growing existential crises of nuclear annihilation and climate change, and a persistent fear, ignorance, and avoidance of aging and death. However, education—particularly in the West—has yet to fundamentally reconcile with death as a means of understanding and living life. This paper thus engages “survivance” and “lived experiences with displacement… [and] death” through conceptual and bilingual-bicultural analyses of “ontology,” “epistemology,” “death,” and “faith” as co-specifying dimensions of a curriculum for human being and becoming.

Author

• Jason Goulah, DePaul University