When Loss Gets Personal: Discussing Death Through Literature in the Secondary Ela Classroom

When Loss Gets Personal considers how secondary English language arts teachers and teacher educators can sensitively and thoughtfully teach pieces of literature in their classrooms in which death is a significant, if not central, aspect of the texts. Death is something that affects all people young and old, yet it is rarely discussed openly in classrooms despite its prevalence in texts read in ELA classrooms. Whether it is canonical or contemporary literature, middle grades or young adult literature, fiction, nonfiction, or graphic novels, literature provides a vehicle to have difficult but needed conversations about personal deaths such as cancer, accidents, suicide, etc.

Each chapter in this book focuses on 1-2 texts and provides practical activities that ask students to engage with the loss through writing assignments, projects, activities, and discussion prompts in order to build empathy, understanding, and develop critically-minded and engaged students. When Loss Gets Personal will be of interest to English language arts teachers, teacher educators, librarians, and scholars who wish to explore with their students the complex emotions that revolve around discussing deaths that occur in literature.

Michelle M. Falter is an assistant professor of English education at North Carolina State University. Michelle’s scholarship focuses on dialogic, critical, and feminist pedagogies, emotion in the teaching of literature and writing in secondary classrooms, English teacher education, and adolescent literature. She has previously co-edited the book Teaching Outside the Box but Inside the Standards: Making Room for Dialogue with Teachers College Press.

Steven T. Bickmore is an Associate professor of English Education at the University of Nevada and a past editor of The ALAN Review (2009-2014). He maintains a weekly academic blog on YA Literature―Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday (http://www.yawednesday.com/) and his research includes how English teachers negotiate the teaching of literature using young adult literature, especially around the issues of race, class, and gender.