Exploring school administrators’ perceptions of death education in public schools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Talking about death can positively impact health outcomes yet, death remains taboo. As a public health approach to palliative care, death education is one way to normalize conversations about death, dying, caregiving for those with life-limiting illness, and loss. Currently, these themes are not considered as part of the health curriculum in Manitoba. To find novel ways to bring death, dying, caregiving, and grieving into our daily discourse and to increase our death literacy, it is essential to consider upstream interventions for all ages. Death education is one such approach. To date, the current landscape of death education in the Manitoba public school system and administrators’ perceptions of introducing and integrating this into the curriculum are unexplored. Method: A exploratory, descriptive qualitative design was used. Semi-structured interviews were used to elicit experiences with death education and perceptions of formal inclusion in the curriculum from public school principals (n=7). Interviews were transcribed verbatim and content coding was used for analysis in conjunction with reflexive journals. Results: The study revealed conversations about death and grief do occur in schools, while caregiving, life-limiting illness, and dying are left out of the discussion. Schools respond as best they can with limited resources and without guidance. There is an appetite to including death education in the classroom. Administrators saw potential barriers to doing so but also noted supportive measures and specific strategies that would assist in integrating these themes. Conclusion: The knowledge gained from this study highlights the need to proactively address death, dying, caregiving, and loss in the school system. It also addresses the gap in the empirical literature regarding the current landscape and school administrators’ perspectives on including death education in the curriculum.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".