Pedagogy of the Deceased: The Cemetery as a Classroom for Community Development and Hope

As individuals and as communities, how do we learn to recognize that death contributes to life? The purpose of my research is to explore how matters pertaining to death and mortality can teach us to connect everyday personal experiences with issues of injustice, violence, and ecological crisis. Working with Freirean critical pedagogy in conjunction with key insights from the North American death education movement, my research lays groundwork for an innovative “pedagogy of the deceased” whereby humanizing praxis (as per critical pedagogy) can be integrated with death-inclusionary praxis (as per death education). By way of contextualizing and embodying this integrated pedagogy of the deceased, my research includes a place-based component (based in Waterloo, Ontario) involving a group of eleven people who participate in a series of Cemetery Café meetings in two local cemeteries. While recognizing the very wide array of funerary traditions (cremation, burial, sky burial, etc.) including many traditions in which the significance of mortality does not depend on any particular site, my research focuses on the cemetery as one particular place in which community-based education can be usefully facilitated. The Cemetery Café includes discussions, embodied learning activities, individual reflection, and group brainstorming about how the cemetery can foster community development and hope. Datasets include one-to-one interviews, group-generated flipchart papers, photographs, individual homework assignments, and my own researcher field notes. Following an integrative-interpretive approach, I first analyze the “who” of the pedagogy of the deceased by asking who gets to participate in this pedagogy. Secondly, I analyze the cemetery as a classroom, including consideration of how the cemetery can be a place for embodied learning. Thirdly, I analyze what kind of consciousness is cultivated within this pedagogy, and I explore the relationship between human mortality and critical consciousness. In line with the aforementioned analytical work, I conclude by looking at (1) indigenizing the cemetery and our view of mortality, (2) establishing teaching cemeteries (along the lines of teaching hospitals), (3) advancing an ecological approach to death and cemeteries through such practices as green burial, and (4) working and hoping for an end to violence.Ph.D