Eleventh International Conference on Health, Wellness & Society

Abstract

In researching how to develop compassionate schools, I have coalesced health promoting palliative care research with school community-based literature. Specifically, I have drawn from Palliative Care Australia which provides a complete and inclusive strategy for bereavement support in communities (Aoun, Breen, Rumbold, & Howting, 2014) and Kellehear’s ‘Compassionate cities’ concept which focuses on compassion as an imperative in empowering communities and building capacity (Kellehear, 1999). Set within a Western educational context, semi-structured interviews involved students, parents, teachers, and principals from rural primary school communities in Victoria, Australia. The research criteria stipulated that each participant must have experienced a close bereavement in the last 6 years and that they belonged to a primary school community at that time. In this study I explore how primary school community members currently engage with death, dying and bereavement by making explicit their assumptions, values and strategies. This paper describes participant responses which suggest a desired cultural and societal shift in relation to how death, dying, and bereavement issues are perceived and currently responded to in primary school communities. Five main theoretical categories from the study emerged including: challenging cultural perceptions; creating a culture of support; creating a grief informed culture; establishing a culture of reflection and reflexivity and determining a whole school plan. Importantly, the participants suggest that both perceptual and practical change is desirable to constructively engage with death, dying and bereavement issues. These theoretical categories are now comprised in a framework for schools, namely, ‘The Intentional Compassion Framework’.