Death Education in the Writing Classroom

ABOUT THE BOOK Death is often encountered in English courses—Hamlet's death, celebrity death, death from the terrorist attacks on 9/11—but students rarely have the opportunity to write about their own experiences with death. In Death Education in the Writing Classroom, Jeffrey Berman shows how college students can write safely about dying, death, and bereavement. The book is based on an undergraduate course on love and loss that Berman taught at the University at Albany in 2008. Part 1, “Diaries,” is organized around Berman's diary entries written immediately after each class. These entries provide a week-by-week glimpse of class discussions, highlighting his students' writings and their developing bonds with classmates and teacher. Part 2, "Breakthroughs," focuses on several students' important educational and psychological discoveries in their understanding of love and loss. The student writings touch on many aspects of death education, including disenfranchised grief. The book explores how students write about not only mourning and loss but also depression, cutting, and abortion—topics that occupy the ambiguous border of death-in-life.Death Education in the Writing Classroom is the first book to demonstrate how love and loss can be taught in a college writing class—and the first to describe the week-by-week changes in students' cognitive and affective responses to death. This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to writing teachers, students, clinicians, and bereavement counselors. Intended Audience: This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to educators, clinicians, social scientists, bereavement counselors, cultural studies theorists, graduate and undergraduate students, and anyone who wishes to learn more about death education.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jeffrey Berman is Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University at Albany. He received his Ph.D. in English at Cornell University in 1971 and served as a research scholar at the Training Institute of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis in New York City from 1980 to 1983. Berman is the recipient of the President's Award for Excellence in Teaching and Advising and the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, and he is listed in the Dictionary of International Biography, Who's Who in America, Who's Who in American Education, and Who's Who Among America's Teachers. He is the author of twelve books and more than 100 book chapters, articles, and reviews. He has also served as Series Editor for Literature and Psychoanalysis, published by New York University Press. Berman's books and articles on teaching have been featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed and on National Public Radio. As a result of the death of his wife, Barbara, in 2004, he has focused his teaching, lecturing, and writing on death education, including, most recently, Dying to Teach: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Learning (SUNY Press, 2007), Death in the Classroom: Writing about Love and Loss (SUNY Press, 2009), and Companionship in Grief: Love and Loss in the Memoirs of C.S. Lewis, John Bayley, Donald Hall, Joan Didion, and Calvin Trillin (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). He lives in Albany, New York, with his cherished companion, Julie.