Contribution to Book
“Grieving Like a Normal Person”: Examining Responses to Grief in Nina LaCour’s We Are Okay
When Loss Gets Personal: Discussing Death through Literature in the Secondary ELA Classroom
(2018)
Abstract
Themes of death, dying, and grieving are not only omnipresent in literature, but are experiences that have shaped all students’ lives in some way. However, teachers are often lacking concrete pedagogical strategies for engaging students with this important topic in their classrooms. In this paper, the authors suggest the use of perspective-taking strategies, grounded in reader-response theories, to deconstruct and analyze characters’ (and their own) experiences with death and dying using the contemporary young adult novel, We Are Okay by Nina LaCour. Rather than considering death and responses to death in concrete terms, death and grief are regarded as topics that will elicit very specific and unique responses from different readers given their own experiences and beliefs, and the specific texts being studied. The perspective taking strategies suggested can be applied widely across texts incorporate themes of death and grieving.
Disciplines
Publication Date
Fall 2018
Publisher
Rowman & Littlefield
Citation Information
Jenna Spiering and Kate E. Kedley. "“Grieving Like a Normal Person”: Examining Responses to Grief in Nina LaCour’s We Are Okay" When Loss Gets Personal: Discussing Death through Literature in the Secondary ELA Classroom (2018) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/kate-kedley/12/