Research Notes: Student Experiences of Engaging with Death Studies After COVID-19, Natalie Pitimson
The Covid-19 pandemic brought threatened, and actual, death closer to young people’s lives than it has been, arguably, for generations. It is therefore important to understand the impact this has had on young people’s relationship with death and in particular how death education is now experienced in a post-pandemic educational environment.
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with multiple losses and collective grief, forcing people to confront their own mortality, increasing general levels of death anxiety and within education complicating teaching pedagogies in this field (Weaver et al, 2022). Death anxiety varies significantly by demographic factors and is generally higher amongst younger adults (Carmack & Degroot, 2018). There has been a growing amount of literature exploring the experiences and complexities of teaching during the pandemic and the multiple challenges that arose from online and hybrid teaching as well as the experience of young people in the classroom at this time (Gamage et al., 2022). But the final lockdown restrictions ended in the UK in July 2021 and since then students have returned to the classroom.
For sure, some teaching methods and approaches have been continued on in the post-pandemic classroom, but the general post-lockdown response has been to restore processes and procedures to what they were before lockdown. However, it is important to consider the individual learner in this context in regard to how they may have been changed by the pandemic and in particular what this might mean for them engaging with sensitive topics in educational settings moving forward.
To this end I carried out research that was focused on the impact the pandemic had on the ways in which young people have responded to the idea of learning about death. A key theme that was discussed by the students I spoke to relates to the importance of ritual in higher education and how central these were to them having positive classroom experiences. Returning to in-person teaching after just over a year of online tuition represented of course a significant restoration of routine for these students, but beyond that, specific elements of classroom practices that represented consistency and familiarity and therefore also comfort in a sense were discussed by participants as being most welcome after the anomie elicited by the pandemic. However, students also talked about necessary shifts in ‘normal’ classroom engagement that they felt was necessary within a death studies classroom, particularly in regard to the imagined other embodied by their peers. Specifically, they discussed feeling more boundaried and edited in their interactions with classmates when dealing with sensitive topics because of the unknown experiences that people may have had during the pandemic.
Students also talked at length about the ways in which death studies enabled them to better language their experiences of isolation, fear and for some, loss, during the pandemic, particularly in regard to the ways in which death studies introduced them to ideas around death denial and language barriers in expressing mortality concerns. Fundamentally, these students demonstrated the intricate relationship between traumatic lived experience and educational engagement. They found comfort and solace in the broader act of returning to the familiar conventions of the classroom and educational protocols but also found that once they were within such spaces again and exploring topics that closely connected to recent global traumatic events such as death, dying and mortality salience, they felt the need to recalibrate how they related to their peers on the grounds of more acute unknowns around the pandemic experience of others. But they also found empowerment too in taking from such learning environments a better understanding of social and cultural issues with engaging with death in society.