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UBC Theses and Dissertations

Death as true bridge Rosenberg, Margot Claire

Abstract

In this thesis, storytelling was used as a bridge to dialogue with young children around death. A children's story with a death theme was read by either the author or her colleague to four small groups of children ages three to six. These story sessions were part of the children's weekly routine, and relationships between the children and their respective storytellers were previously established and on-going. The spontaneous reactions, questions, comments, and stories that the children interjected during the stories are woven throughout the text. Interviews with this co-storyteller/colleague and another preschool teacher at the same school were conducted to ascertain whether or not they had discussed death in their early childhood classrooms and if so how, their ideas and beliefs about children's perceptions of death, their own experiences with death, and whether or not they thought these personal experiences influence their curricular decisions. These story sessions and interviews provided a framework within which the author could reflect upon and share her own experiences and struggles with death, and her grief over the recent death of her mother. Journal entries, dreams, and stories past and present are interspersed throughout the text in an attempt to document the ways in which participating in and then writing about these experiences have impacted her as a storyteller, researcher, teacher, and daughter. These many voices are woven within three themes, or chapters: other in self, gain in loss, and life in death. Death is used as the medium with which to bridge each of these binary opposites. This thesis explores ways of doing as well as ways of being with children and death in the classroom, with the hope that educators and parents might choose to broach this subject with the children in their lives. This thesis concludes with the author's realization that death has taught her to reach; reach out to children, teachers, graduate students, the bereaved, and others who choose to listen to the stories she weaves.

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