Visions of Intergenerational Grief Work as Education for Liberation

Abstract

There is no teaching and learning untouched by grief, and any classroom concerned with love must also be concerned with loss. Education for liberation requires the study, struggle, and praxis of grief. In the spirit of communion with the reader, we each offer story – along with our own analysis of how we understand the importance of the story – as an invitation to encourage our readers to conjure their own stories and analyses. Our process of writing included therapeutic, virtual healing sessions where we curated space and conversation to explore and share our own grief, each other’s grief, our shared and distinct experiences, and how we each think about and experience grief as a liberatory teacher. These sessions were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed for the emerging themes: The value and necessity of intergenerational villages of grief healing, the relations within these villages, and grief work as education for liberation.