Irish Primary School Teachers’ perspectives of coping with childhood grief and loss in the classroom, due to bereavement, separation, and divorce.

Abstract

This research projects explores teachers’ perspectives of coping with childhood grief in the classroom, namely due to bereavement, separation, and divorce. Its central aim was to discover how comfortable teachers’ feel responding to such sensitive issues and how adequately prepared they felt to face these challenging situations. All the participants involved in this study were fully qualified, practicing teachers, with a variety of teaching years and experience. Employing a qualitative method of one to one semi-structured interviews, four main themes emerged. These surrounded; Initial Teacher Education (ITE), communicating with children about grief and loss, school and curriculum responses to bereavement, separation and divorce and conceptualizing grief and loss. The findings of this study suggest that teachers may leave ITE feeling somewhat unprepared to tackle grief and loss in the classroom. Despite this, responses varied with some individuals feeling more comfortable and willing to discuss grief and loss issues, perhaps implying that a teacher’s character, personal experiences or fears may play a central role in how they respond to these sensitive topics. School and curricula responses to grief and loss was found to be of significant importance with a prevailing view that the SPHE curriculum does not adequately address grief and loss however experiences with additional programmes, such as Rainbow’s Ireland and Zippy Friends, was extremely rich and varied. Conceptualizing grief and loss was found to be a complex task, nevertheless there was a general consensus that there is a sense of grief and loss associated with a family breakdown but that it differs significantly to the feelings experienced following a bereavement. The findings also suggest that further research in this area is needed from an Irish context.