Submission Type
General Submission
Abstract
Death is generally unspoken, ignored, and considered too difficult to bring forward into our classrooms. Bringing death to my contemplative pedagogy has been essential for me as a teacher and on behalf of my middle school students. The deepest and most reverential way that we do this in my classroom is through an annual remembrance ritual. On this day, we remember people and pets in our lives who have died. We do inner work through journaling and meditation. The heart of our ritual day involves naming, sharing stories, and deep listening. This reflective essay tells the story of developing this ritual, along with its impact on my students and our classroom community. I explore the mechanics of this contemplative practice, and how they are guided by views on child development, spiritual development, and holistic education. It is also an invitation to consider how trusting children in ritual is absent in nearly all modern educational spaces. As teachers, in what ways can we hold and frame space and time for this essential human need? I conclude with what I feel my students bring forward with them in their lives from participation in ritual as part of their contemplative education.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Van Gelder, Kari
(2026)
"A Remembrance Ritual in the Classroom--Death, Middle School, and Contemplative Education,"
Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education: Vol. 3:
Iss.
2, Article 6.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.25035/jche.03.02.06
Available at:
https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/jche/vol3/iss2/6