From a crisis management tool to proactive death education in Swedish preschools

Abstract

This study is part of a larger project with the general aim of developing the ability of preschool practitioners to reflect critically on their practice related to children's grief and questions about death. The article is based on six focus-group interviews and a workshop during which preschool practitioners reflected on and worked with a national crisis management tool: the crisis box. Through the theory of didactic transposition the analysis sheds light on how death education and crisis management related to death in Swedish early childhood education represents a disconnect between the practitioners’ discomfort with teaching about biologic death and the children's need of comfort and understanding of what biologic death entails. The realization of this disconnect prompted the practitioners to consider developing a child-friendly didactic tool that would better support children's emotional processing and that could also be used for proactive death education. Our findings indicate that early childhood educators are in need of training in how to teach about the biological facts of human death in terms of universality, irreversibility, nonfunctionality, causality, and noncorporeal continuation. Only this way can educators be equipped with the knowledge, skills, and confidence to engage in open and age-appropriate conversations with children about biologic death, fostering a supportive and safe environment for them to express their feelings and ask questions.