—Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit (Virgil’s The Aeneid)

And perhaps it will be a joy to remember these things one day 

by Brooke Thomas

I found out my student had passed when another student pulled me aside in the hallway just before the start of our Monday lecture. She had known him–let’s call him James–indirectly. They weren’t friends (almost no one in my hybrid class was) but had met before attending college. As I stood with her in the hallway, I realized I had no idea how to proceed. Stop class? Make an announcement? Comfort her? Remain calm? So, perhaps unprofessionally, I asked her.

She thought it would be best not to address it as no one knew him. Telling them might be a morbid breach of privacy. The rest of class was an out-of-body experience. James and I had only the previous week been working on an alternate set of deadlines for assignments he had missed during a bout of couch surfing and being unhoused. He had given me a fist bump as he left the classroom, thanking me for my understanding. I didn’t believe he would get the work done, but I hoped. What do I do?

It’s important to note that these things, as rare as they might seem, are not altogether uncommon, and most universities have resources. My department chair referred me to a grief counselor who could come to the class and speak, should I choose, but I opted not to tell the rest of class and instead directed the student who gave me that news to that counselor. I’m still not sure this was right, but it was done now. I knew these resources existed, of course. I had already utilized some of them when James asked me for help with his unstable living situation, though I’ll never know if he took them up. I am not sure they would have offered much, at any rate. I’m not sure anything mattered. Only days after his death, Trump was reelected and NY ballot propositions targeting unhoused and low-income immigrants passed in less than a week; the war in Gaza waged on, campuses still antagonized students expressing Palestine solidarity, and a hurricane washed away the mountain town I used to visit in high school when I skipped class.

Is there a pedagogy of grief? I asked my former practicum instructor whether or not it was selfish to think of myself so much in the face of James’ death. She said it was human. She once told me that, as a graduate student, I should play up how proximal my position and age were to that of my students, and at this moment there felt little distance. Sometime after this discussion, I read a piece by Sharon Murphy Augustine who lost multiple students at her high school in the same year. In it, she reminisces: “I remember worrying that I would do the wrong thing in my classes. I would either err on the side of downplaying students’ grief or on the side of wallowing in grief. I thought that there was a way to get grief just right.”[1] While Augustine ultimately left teaching, she concludes her article with a meditation on what we might look forward to in approaches to education:

Intellectually, I might have understood that deaths could happen to my students, but facing the loss and its aftermath is always a shock. For me, the takeaway is not that there is a way to be prepared or a grief curriculum to use as an intervention or another committee to form but that the experiences that we arrange for our students in schools should have meaning for them in an immediate sense, not just as preparation for some distant future. Tragically, some of them will not have futures, so where is the meaningful engagement that helps them to live their lives more deeply in the present? . . . I wonder how the curriculum would look if we approached it not as only preparation for life but life itself. What if the future that we are preparing our students for is now?[2]

Of course, there is no one way to grieve, and I was not sure whether my own decision not to discuss this with the class had encroached on their ability to grieve. These questions, along with my painful ignorance on whether or not to address James’ death, urged me to do what I as a graduate student am so good at doing–research. 

In discussing ignorance, Erik Malewski and Nathalia Jaramillo ask us to go beyond “generous thinking,” [3] though that too goes a long way in creating a more equitable classroom. Rather, they implore us to use unknowing as a mode of inquiry:

Epistemologies of ignorance reveal and interrogate. . . In doing so, they generate the opportunity for us to inquire about the different ways ignorance operates and about the possibilities of “useful ignorance” . . . When knowledge is rooted in doing, and when the act of knowing is based on interactions with others and with our natural world, then perhaps we can accept that knowing always involves unknowing.[4]

Perhaps this is also what Augustine points to when she talks about our students (and our own) uncertain futures, about preparing for the now. Staring at my class with unshareable knowledge, afraid of doing the wrong thing, I did not allow my ignorance to be “useful.”

I didn’t know this, but when giving that advice to “play up how close in age and situation I am to my students,” my practicum instructor was teaching me “relational pedagogy,” a practice that hinged on the relationships I built–or wanted to build–with my students.[5] But, there will always be unknowable situations. Like when, for example, one of my students notified me she had a family emergency–an excuse all instructors hear many times a semester–and had to miss an important in-class activity that could not be made up (an in-class workshop): I was within my rights per the syllabus to count that as a zero, but I allowed her to do it from home. Weeks later, she would Zoom me from beside a hospital bed during a required final-essay conference with me. 

There are on-the-nose approaches to handling grief in the classroom–when the catharsis is universally necessary. Grief-writing exercises, which involve individual writing tasks that center individual and lived experiences, can help confront the unknown in ourselves and hold space for our neighbor Indeed, grief writing’s positive effects on student resilience and leadership have been documented, and students empowered by these practices often gain confidence in advocating for their personal interests.[6] Yet, it is obviously unrealistic to think every class period can have a cathartic exercise or a creative expression of mourning. What we can do is practice an acceptance of unknowability–we can let things remain unknowable. I don’t mean unknowable in the way I kept my classroom in the dark about James’s death but rather in the way that we simply do not need to get to the bottom of everything, which might feel contrary to our instincts as academics. Relational pedagogy is not so much about knowing too much about the other but rather about sitting with each other’s humanity and understanding the messiness, ignorance, and failure of the endeavor while also revering the responsibilities we have and roles we play in another’s life and learning.[7] I don’t have all the answers; my students don’t have all the answers, but together, we can build something useful. 

Brooke Thomas is a PhD Candidate in English studying medieval literature

References

[1] Sharon Murphy Augustine. “Grief and Teaching: The Unnatural Order of Things,” Under the Bleachers: Teachers’ Reflections of What They Didn’t Learn in College. Edited by Joseph R. Jones. Sense Publishers (2015); at 123.

[2] Augustine, 123-124.

[3] Kathleen Fitzpatrick. Generous Thinking. Johns Hopkins University Press (2018).

[4] Erik Malewski and Nathalia Jaramillo. Epistemologies of Ignorance in Education. Information Age Publishing Incorporated (2011); at 9.

[5] See an explicit definition of “relational pedagogy”

[6] Peachey, K. B. & Lee, C. C. Writing to grieve: Solidarity in times of loss in educational community spaces. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, vol. 67, (2023) p. 136–149.

[7] See Andrew Hickey and Stewart Riddle. “Proposing a Conceptual Framework for Relational Pedagogy: Pedagogical Informality, Interface, Exchange and Enactment.” International Journal of Inclusive Education, vol. 28, no. 13 (2023): 3271–85; at 3271. At 3271, relational pedagogy is defined as “draw[ing] attention to this imbrication of teacher and student with knowledge to position enactments of teaching and learning as the ‘outcomes’ of this interrelationship.”

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