Living in heaven and buried in the earth? Teaching young children about death

ABSTRACT This qualitative study focuses on preschool practitioners’ teaching about death. The theoretical framework draws on ideas about dialogic teaching and the concepts that are of importance for understanding what biological death entails. The study was conducted within a qualitative, participant centered paradigm. The data consist of video recordings of four visits to cemeteries conducted by 6 practitioners and 26 children (three-five years old) from two preschools. The findings show that relying on a child centered pedagogy, when the practitioners do not plan the content of the activity but rely exclusively on the children’s curiosity, does not function well as a pedagogical strategy in relation to an existential question that the practitioners themselves find sensitive. The article contributes to developing the didactics of death that enables preschool practitioners to develop the ability to reflect critically on questions and topics related to different understandings of death(s) in early childhood education.


Introduction
In recent years, there has been an increased focus on the didactics of death in early childhood education, as practitioners recognize the importance of helping young children navigate and understand the concept of death (Bowie 2000;Galende 2015;Pratt 1987;Puskás, Jeppsson, and Andersson 2021).The idea of death or being dead is one of the fundamental questions of life that children are often concerned with (Löfdahl 2005).Nevertheless, while the curiosity of death in early childhood is a universal phenomenon, children may have very different experiences of what death implies and how death is understood and dealt with (Talwar 2011).Moreover, earlier research shows that while children like to discuss existential issues, their teachers feel great uncertainty about how to respond to children's queries (Hartman 1992(Hartman , 2009;;Löfstedt 2011).Preschool practitioners often feel that they lack sufficient training and knowledge about how to address issues related to death (Puskás, Jeppsson, and Andersson 2021).
In Sweden, over 80% of all children between one and five years old are enrolled in preschool education.In the age group three-five, the rate is 95% (Skolverket 2021).Thus, Swedish preschool is not only the first stage of the national education system but also an important aspect of what growing up in Sweden entails.As a significant part of early childhood is lived in preschools, early childhood education plays an important part in promoting the well-being and learning of children.
The idea that children are active agents of their own learning, together with the discourse on child-centered pedagogy has a strong position in Swedish early childhood education.Within this discourse on learning and teaching, the teacher is considered as an adult who provides conditions for the child's own autonomous learning process rather than as an authority with expert knowledge (Kryger 2004).Talking about teaching in Swedish preschools is a relatively new phenomenon and is met with some skepticism by early childhood practitioners, who fear moving from child centered towards teacher centered education (Hedefalk et al. 2021;Öqvist and Cervantes 2018).In the 2018 preschool curriculum (Skolverket 2018), 'teaching' was introduced for the first time as a concept that involves 'stimulating and challenging the children' (Skolverket 2018, 7), while the content of the teaching may be planned or appear spontaneously.In this study, we apply the concept of dialogic teaching (Alexander 2006(Alexander , 2018) ) to refer to a goal oriented pedagogy that is characterized by dialogic inquiry based teaching rather than using teachers as 'experts' who expect children to take in knowledge but not to criticize or challenge.
All children gradually learn that death is ultimately unavoidable for all living things; and that, most of the time, death is caused by natural factors, over which we do not have control.Nevertheless, while there is an extensive amount of research from a cognitive and psychological perspective about how young children understand death, research on how and what preschool teachers teach about death is limited.This is an empirical gap worth filling, as preschool is an important socialization arena where adults have the opportunity to effect children's social and psychological development.This study aims to obtain insights on how dialogic teaching about death occurs in Swedish preschools through answering the following research questions: (1) How and what do preschool practitioners teach about biological death?and (2) How do preschool practitioners deal with culturally constructed beliefs related to death?

Teaching about death as a cultural (religious) and biological phenomenon
Previous research on how teachers deal with children's inquiries about death shows that questions related to death and dying are considered sensitive and at times are treated as an educational taboo (Bowie 2000;Galende 2015).This is probably why, in early childhood education, research about the issues related to a death and its didactics have a marginalized position.It has been suggested that the issues related to death didactics can be dealt with in two separate ways.One of the suggestions is that death education ought to be integrated into the curriculum and to be dealt with as any other curricular subject, while the other suggestion is that death should be solely discussed when necessary, e.g. when a child addresses the topic or when it becomes necessary due to, for example, catastrophic events reported in the media (Bowie 2000).This article aims to contribute to the field of death didactics within early childhood education, with 'death didactics' defined as the knowledge and skills teachers need in order to be able to tackle the issues related to death (Galende 2015).
Earlier research suggests that 'discussing death and dying in biological terms is the best way to alleviate fear of death in young children' (Slaughter and Griffiths 2007, 525).Research within cognitive developmental perspectives has found that children include the term death in their vocabulary as early as the age of two (e.g.Carey 1985).Several researchers (e.g.Christian 1997;Slaughter and Lyons 2003;Tamm and Granqvist 1995) have shown that in parallel to developing an understanding of what biological death entails, children implicitly get exposed to several interrelated concepts to death, such as irreversibility, finality, inevitability, and causality (Christian 1997).Research has also shown that children as young as three years old can understand the finality and irreversibility of death, and using clear and honest language can help them come to terms with it.Thus, in order to understand what biological death entails, children need to be taught that death is not something that can be reversed; that it is a permanent condition, as well as a natural process.
Research on how the belief in noncorporeal continuity, the belief that something continues after death, impacts on young children's understanding of death is limited (for an exception, see Bering, Blasi, and Bjorklund 2005) but studies on how older children (over age 10) and adults understand noncorporeal continuity suggest that 'both children and adults have beliefs in the afterlife, that these beliefs increase with age, and that religious and biological conceptions of death may coexist in the minds of children and adults' (Rosengren, Gutiérrez, and Schein 2014, 67).However, there is a difference between talking about death with other adults who share a biological understanding and a vocabulary related to death and dying, and to young children who have not yet developed a full understanding of biological death.The euphemisms that adults consider reassuring or emollient can be misleading and worrying from a child perspective.
According to the studies of Bering and Bjorklund (2004) and Bering (2011), afterlife beliefs emerge in preschool age because the human mind is predisposed to noncorporeal continuity.Other researchers, for example Astuti and Harris (2008) and Harris and Gimenez (2005), found that culturally specific experiences and narratives have a strong impact on the development of afterlife beliefs, and that afterlife beliefs are culturally constructed.At the same time, researchers (Harris and Gimenez 2005;Legare et al. 2012;Rosengren, Gutiérrez, and Schein 2014) also found that culturally constructed beliefs coexist with biological views and that older children (like adults) engage in a form of dualistic thinking between cultural (often religious) and biological explanations (Talwar 2011).
Researchers studying the subject argue for more research on young children's developing death concepts and urge adults (parents and educational practitioners) to promote children's understanding of biological concepts (Author 4 2018).To date, to our knowledge, no previous studies address how death education that combines biologic and cultural understandings of death occurs.Thus, this study contributes to the integration of didactical knowledge and content specific knowledge regarding death education in early childhood education and care.

Method and material
Research collaboration was initiated with two preschools in Sweden.The research team designed an outline of a theme work (Appendix 1) and asked the participating preschools to use it as a point of departure for teaching about death in their own practice.The outline included two main tasks.One task was to focus on what biological death entails and work with the concepts of irreversibility, finality, causality and inevitability (Christian 1997).The second task was to address cultural/religious conceptions of what happens after death, as well as rituals and symbols related to death.
The research project this study is part of has been approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Agency (2019-02187).The participating preschool practitioners and the guardians of participating children were informed about the advantages and risks of the study, that participating was voluntary, and that research data are treated as strictly confidential.The information letter and the written consent form have been approved and signed by all participating practitioners and the guardians of participating children.
Both participating preschools chose to arouse the children's (three-five years old) interest in questions related to death through visiting local cemeteries.The visits were planned with the same educational goal in mind (cf.Appendix 1) in both preschools: to teach children about death.Preschool A visited a cemetery twice with the same child group (six children and two practitioners) and relied on the practitioners' own knowledge and experience.During the first visit, the preschool teachers realized that they did not have time to explore everything of interest, so decided to return and continue the excursion on another occasion.In this paper, the two visits are treated together.
From Preschool B, two different groups of children visited a cemetery on the same day.The practitioners in Preschool B planned the visits together with two parish educators who they described for us as 'experts on death and dying'.The two visits (altogether 20 children aged three-five) had an identical outline: a puppet theater performance by two parish educators in the church, followed by a walkaround in the cemetery.The two visits to the cemetery by Preschool B were conducted under the leadership of the same three preschool practitioners and two parish educators.
In collaboration with the preschool practitioners, we decided that the practitioners would document the visits to the cemeteries themselves.A methodological advantage of self-recording is that the practitioners focused their attention on situations they considered relevant and as part of their didactical approach.The recordings were made by one of the practitioners in both preschools, and the video recordings captured all parts of the visit, from the arrival to the end.
The data consist of video recordings of four visits to cemeteries conducted by six practitioners and a total of 26 three-five year old children.This data collection process resulted in a total data of 73 min for Preschool A and 88 min for Preschool B. A total of 53 min of the recordings from Preschool B was not used in the analysis due to the fact that the parish educators performed the story about Mr Muffin 1 without any verbal interactions with the audience, and thus their performance does not fulfill the criteria of dialogic teaching.During the performance, the children and the preschool practitioners were listening silently to the story.There was no room for questions in connection to the performance.After the story was told, the parish educators, preschool practitioners and the children went out from the church together to visit the cemetery.During the walkarounds, the parish educators had an unobtrusive role and engaged in very few discussions.
The recordings from the walkarounds in the cemeteries were transcribed verbatim.Thereafter, the transcripts were read through a didactic lens, where the questions what is taught and how were in focus.The question of how dialogic teaching occurs was addressed through employing Alexander's dialogic teaching model (2006,2018).Alexander has developed his model as a way of challenging the epistemic dominance of the teacher in school class interactions.We consider his ideas transferable into early childhood educational settings because the model of dialogic teaching is in line with the basic tenets of Swedish early childhood education, according to which children are agents of their own learning and preschool teachers ought to enable collaborative meaning making through building on the children's own ideas and experiences.We argue that, for these ideas to work in practice, teaching in preschools ought to be: . Collectivepractitioners and children address learning tasks together .Reciprocalpractitioners and children listen to each other, share ideas and consider alternative viewpoints .Supportivechildren articulate their ideas and questions freely, and practitioners and children help each other to reach common understandings .Cumulativepractitioners and children build on their own and each other's ideas and chain them into coherent lines of thinking and enquiry .Purposefulteachers plan and facilitate dialogic teaching with particular educational goals in view Thus, for dialogic teaching to be purposeful it must involve one or a few educational goals and a shared pedagogical focus.

Results
Through examining what ideas and lines of thinking and enquiry the discussions between children and practitioners evolved around, we found that biologic death and cultural understandings emerged as competing and complementary explanations.The results are presented in terms of the content of the teaching accomplished in collaboration between the practitioners and the children and is divided into three sub-sections depending on whether biologic, cultural, or both understandings were in focus.

Children's interest in biologic death in focus
During their visits to the cemeteries, children from both preschools articulated their ideas and questions freely, and the children and practitioners addressed the learning tasks together.Thereby, we can establish that the teaching activities about death were collective in both preschools and aimed at fulfilling the principles of dialogic teaching.However, as the following excerpts exemplify, addressing the learning tasks together is a challenging enterprise.This is probably why the parish educators, who obtained a traditional teacher role and who are experts on dying but not on early childhood pedagogy, remained mostly in the background.On the few occasions where the children initiated a discussion with one of the parish educators, as the following excerpt shows, the discussion tended to evolve into a presentation about burial customs.
Excerpt 1 1 CH5 When you get old, you die. 2 PE1 Yes, exactly.3 PE1 Or, some (people) don't want to be burned, instead they want a coffin and then they have to be buried in that coffin and buried in the ground, and then it is done that way.So either you decide it (how you want it after your death), and write it (your wish) down on a piece of paper because then everyone knows, or your relatives get to decide.4 CH5 Do you know, do you know what my (inaudible) one like this round with a flower on it.5 PE1 Yes, exactly.We thought we would take a little walk here and look at some of the graves that are here because they (the graves) can look a little different.
The utterance 'when you get old you die' by CH5 indicates that the child is aware of the inevitability of death, as well as of a causal relationship between old age and death.The parish educator acknowledges the child's knowledge about biologic death (line 2) but at the same time reorients the focus of the dialogue for burial customs rather than elaborating on the inevitability and causality of death.While during the evolving discussion the parish educators and the child address the learning task of talking about death, the shift in focus leads to a situation in which the child's interest in and knowledge about biologic death is validated but not further scaffolded.Instead, the parish educator introduces another aspect of the topic that she seems to be more comfortable withburial customs.The talk about burial customs can be seen as cumulative and purposeful as it builds on an exchange of ideas with the educational goal of talking about death related issues.At the same time, the child's knowledge about the causal relationship between old age and death is not scaffolded or extended by the parish educator.
Children-initiated discussions about biological death were also present in Preschool A, where upon entering the cemetery several children started to talk about their dead relatives: Excerpt 2 1 CH1 My grandfather died because he smoked.2 PT1 Was it so? 3 CH1 Yes.He quit but it was too late, he was already sick, it was too late.4 PT1 It didn't help that he quit smoking?Maybe he had smoked so long that he had already become ill from all the smoking.5 CH1 My grandmother did it, but she did not die.6 PT1 No? 7 CH1 She is still with us.8 PT1 How nice.
In excerpt 2, CH1 initiates a dialogue by stating that 'My grandfather died … '.Next, the teacher responded with a question (line 2) and the dialogue continued with the practitioner and the child chaining their ideas into a coherent dialogue.However, the child's utterance (line 1), where she refers to the causality between illness and death, is not further developed by PT1.While in line 4 PT1 confirms that there is a causality between smoking and sickness, the coherent line of enquiry is broken when the issue of causality between smoking-illness and death is not followed up.

Cultural understandings in focus
When the group of children and practitioners from Preschool A entered the cemetery they stopped at a sign saying that only dogs on a leash were allowed.After reading the text on the sign, PT2 started talking about how one should behave in a cemetery.PT3 entered the conversation: Excerpt 3 1 PT3 You have to consider that there are people resting here, and that some people come here when they are sad and visit their mother or father or cousin or friend or grandmother who is in heaven and then you get to show … 2 CH6 In heaven!? (outbursts a child expressing surprise).3 PT3 People believe different things about where they end up when dead. 4 CH3 I visit my grandmother.5 PT3 Some people believe that when you die you end up in heaven, but not everyone believes that.You have the right to believe what you want to believe.
PT3 explains that the children should be quiet and calm because a cemetery is a place for mourning.She also refers to death as a state of rest, saying 'people are lying and resting here'.Conceptualizing death as rest transforms it to something temporary because someone who is resting is expected to rise up (Benczes and Burridge 2018;Fernández 2006).The euphemism also reveals the practitioner's own beliefs regarding death, as she opens up for a narrative about people who are resting in the cemetery are also in heaven, whereupon a child exclaims 'Heaven!?' CH6's reaction indicates surprise, whereupon PT3 says that people have different beliefs about what happens after death and that it is one's right to believe whatever one wants.Meanwhile, CH3 (in line 4) picks up the narrative about people visiting their dead relatives in the cemetery, saying that she used to visit her grandmother, presumably referring to visits to a cemetery.
PT3's presentation of an alternative, cultural narrative to the children's biological understanding of death has a visible impact on how the discussion evolves.When PT3 continues the discussion by asking CH4 where her grandmother is, the discussion evolves as follows: Excerpt 4 CH4's answer that her grandmother was flying around and eating ice cream in heaven, builds on the narrative introduced by PT3 about heaven.PT3 presents an alternative, cultural viewpoint that CH4 picks up and develops.This can be seen as a sign of reciprocity in dialogic communication between the child and the practitioner, given that one of the basic tenets of dialogic teaching is that practitioners and children would listen to each other, share ideas and consider alternative viewpoints.At the same time, the practitioner's narratives about taking a rest (excerpt 3) and heaven (excerpts 3 and 5) imply a shift of focus towards a cultural narrative about life after death.Moreover, PT3's questions perpetuate the idea that heaven is an alternative place where people go to live.This could reinforce the misunderstanding that the dead have chosen to go there, or that they may return one day.

Balancing between biological and cultural understandings of death
In some of the discussion, the biological and cultural understandings of death go hand in hand with each other.In the following example, a child from Preschool B engaged in the following discussion with a preschool practitioner: CH1 She is at grandma's house and is lying there.9 PT4 But isn't Selma dead? 10 CH1 Yees, but she is lying at home at my grandmother's place.11 PT4 Where is she lying then? 12 CH1 She is lying, in a place nearby their home from where they can see the water.13 PT4 Ok, I see, so you mean that Selma is buried there?14 CH1 (Nodding) 15 PT4 What do you think Selma is doing now?Where is she now then if she doesn't … 16 CH1 Up in heaven.17 CH5 (running away from the group) Heaven.18 PT4 Up in heaven.What's going on up there in heaven?19 CH1 You don't get any food, you only get air.20 PT4 (whispering) You get air … So if I turn the camera towards the skies (turns the camera to the sky), is Selma up there?21 CH1 Yeah.
In this excerpt, preschool practitioner PT4 is not satisfied with CH1's first answer, according to which the dead end up in the cemetery, as she poses several questions after the answer was delivered.The child tries to find the answer the practitioner is looking for whereupon they start talking about a concrete case, the child's dead dog Selma.The child's answers in lines 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14 indicate that she is familiar with the notions of irreversibility and finality in the sense that she is more or less convinced that those who die lie in a grave.After several turns the child says what PT4 supposedly expects from her to saythat her dog was in heaven.This answer is verified by PT4 as she starts asking about what heaven was like.
The dialogue between the child and the practitioner fills several criteria of dialogic teaching: they address the learning task, to teach about death, together; they share ideas and consider alternative viewpoints.The practitioners and children help each other to common understandings.The discussions are also cumulative in the sense that the practitioner and the child build on their own and each other's ideas.However, at the same time it is hard to detect what the particular educational goal is in the practitioner's view.From the meaning of utterances we may detect a preference for cultural explanations where life after death is discussed in more detail than what is entailed in biological death.This preference for cultural explanations (from the practitioners' side) is detectable in both preschools.Nevertheless, the following example reveals that at times biological explanations are given preference.The discussion starts with the children and the practitioners discussing how one should behave in a cemetery: Excerpt 6 1 CH1 One has to go. 2 CH2 Otherwise, you can, those who are up (points upwards with both hands), those who live there, they wake up and come, if we step on the flowers, then they will get angry.3 PT1 You believe so?But do you think that those who are in the graves can wake up?They are dead, aren't they? 4 CH2 Yeah. 5 PT1 Yeah, so they won't wake up.6 CH2 Yes, there might only be a skeleton there.7 PT1 Yeah.It can be a skeleton.There are a few different ways in which one can get buried, and we were going to talk about that, we said once, too, how this funeral thing goes, because it was (a child's name) who wondered, how did the people get in under those stones, and that's what we said, that we would talk about it (funerals) one day.
The second utterance of CH2 (line 2) together with his hands pointing upwards reveals that according to the child's imagination the dead live and sleep somewhere behind the skies and get angry if the flowers on the graves get destroyed.PT1 does not contradict him directly.Instead, she poses two questions about whether the child believed that those who lie in graves could 'wake up'.Thereby, PT1 directs the child's attention from the skies to the grave, and says that 'they are dead, after all'.And when the child confirms her statement with a 'yeah', the practitioner affirms 'yes, so they are not going to wake up'.Whereupon CH2 answers 'only a skeleton', an utterance that directs the discussion into another path.
In this example, CH2 draws on the idea that there is continuity after death.The child's own narrative reflects an image where the dead buried in graves sleep in the skies.When the practitioner emphasizes (in line 3) that those buried in graves are 'dead' and 'will not wake up', she implicitly says that biological death is a permanent condition and implies irreversibility and finality.However, in this example, it is the child who makes the consequence of biological death explicit, stating that there is a skeleton in the grave.
The practitioner does not confirm the child's statement about the skeleton with full certainty.Her statement 'Yes, there might only be a skeleton there' introduces a new turn in the discussion, leading towards a topic that the adults in both preschools seem to be comfortable withburial customs.In accordance with Swedish preschool pedagogy principles, the practitioners' strategy is to get the children to tell what they know, think and believe.However, without a particular educational goal attached to the activity, the children's knowledge about death will not necessarily improve.

Discussion
The practitioners in both preschools aimed to facilitate dialogic teaching, and as the analysis revealed, they achieve this as far as the format of teaching is concerned.The adults take the children to the cemetery because they are counting on the children's curiosity, competence, engagement, and that the context 'should talk to them' (Fauske 2022).The resources do inspire the children to ask questions about death and the dead, but the practitionerspreschool teachers or parish educatorstend to avoid talking about biological death.Through Alexander's dialogical model, we could elaborate on how the issue of death was addressed.In accordance with Swedish preschool pedagogy principles, the practitioners' strategy was to get the children to tell what they know, think and believe.Based on the analysis of our empirical material, we could show that the teaching was collective as the children and the practitioners addressed the topic of death together.They talked about death and dying in both biologic and cultural terms, as well as about burial customs and about how to behave in a cemetery.The practitioners and children listened to each other, shared ideas about causality of death, and considered alternative viewpoints about what happens after death.The practitioners were supportive, and the children articulated their ideas and questions about death freely.As far as the cumulative aspect of dialogic teaching is concerned, we can state that the practitioners and children built on their own and each other's ideas about death.Yet, as the discussions mix biological and cultural understandings, they do not result in coherent lines of reasoning.We have shown with several examples how, instead of following the children's interest in biologic death, the adults shift focus towards burial customs (excerpt 2) or ideas about life after death (excepts 3 and 7).One of the postulates of Alexander's model of dialogic teaching is that the teachers have a particular educational goal attached to the activity.We can state that the format of teaching about death in the two preschools was permeated with ideas about dialogic teaching, whereby the practitioners tried to balance between enacting the children's own ideas and their educational goals; the question about what has been taught deserves further attention.
Our analysis shows that due to mixing biological and cultural perspectives, the practitioners fail to build on children's existing knowledge about biological death.The children's questions or demonstrated interest in biologic death generate uncertainty, and instead of scaffolding children's ideas and knowledge, the adults shift focus towards discussing life in heaven, burial customs, and how to behave in cemeteries.In other words, what is missed is the opportunity to scaffold the children's understanding of biological death.This way the practitioners do not simply avoid talking about biologic death as irreversible and inevitable; they also create a narrative within which the cultural understanding, according to which the dead live in heaven, competes with the knowledge that death in a biological sense is final.

Implications
Our findings are in line with previous research, according to which adults often find talking about death and dying to be a challenging endeavor and choose to avoid the topic altogether or use euphemisms such as resting (excerpt 4) or being in heaven (excerpt 7).However, the adults' confusing messages about death may lead to unintended consequences.For young children, for whom biological death is a phenomenon to be explored and understood, cultural narratives that adults consider reassuring or emollient can be misleading and worrying.Euphemism such as 'he has gone to heaven', 'left us', 'laid to rest', and 'what are they doing up there?' may for a child imply that the dead can return.
Previous research on how children understand death suggests that 'discussing death and dying in biological terms is the best way to alleviate fear of death in young children' (Slaughter and Griffiths 2007, 525).Our examples show that children neither avoid talking/asking about death nor find death a sensitive topic.Thus, child centered pedagogy and dialogic teaching could be used as a way of teaching about biologic death.One of the prerequisites for purposeful teaching about death is a didactic awareness in designing the content.Early childhood education would benefit from the findings within cognitive research on young children's understanding of biologic death and the implications of trying to protect children from the realities of life.Note 1. Goodbye Mr Muffin is a picture book for ages three and up to six (Nilsson 2002).Mr Muffin is a guinea pig who looks back and contemplates his life.Then, one morning Mr Muffin gets sick and eventually dies.The story continues with describing the grieving of the family who lost their favourite pet, the death rites, and the question of afterlife.
You can decide for yourself how many occasions the theme work takes and how these occasions are distributed in time, but since we work in parallel with teaching at the university, we would like to be involved in the time planning.We are, of course, happy to be available as a scientific board during planning and implementation.

Form
The theme work can be designed in many different ways.We would like the theme work to consist of several different and possibly complementary working methods.For example, one can imagine supplementing a book discussion with creative work, drama, and a visit to the cemetery.Here, only imagination sets the limits.

Documentation
We are happy to come and document all planned activities in advance.You are also provided a video camera that you can use for documenting your own practice.