On 1 January 2025, a day meant to celebrate new beginnings, I experienced an ending I had never imagined. My 62-year-old mother died after being ill for less than a week. My entire year has been an exercise in working, teaching and learning through grief.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about how grief reshapes everything: the classroom, the institution, the future itself. We often talk about renewal in higher education – reinventing, rebuilding, reimagining – but rarely about what it means to feel loss in an institution that continues as if nothing has changed.
- Building a culture of care to support students’ mental health
- What does empathy look like in the classroom?
- Let’s embrace compassionate pedagogy for a more humane academy
Currently, grief within the sector is widespread. People are mourning the loss of programmes, eliminated positions and colleagues and mentors who are no longer there. Students are grieving opportunities that have quietly disappeared, while faculty carry the weight of what has been cut alongside the work they are still expected to do. This is not only institutional grief – it is collective, shaping the culture of our campuses in ways that are often invisible but deeply felt.
After my mum died, I took a leave from teaching and didn’t return until September. I convinced myself I was through “the worst of it”. Then, only weeks into the semester, an Indigenous student in our programme passed away unexpectedly. Just a year prior, my mum had commissioned this student to make me a ribbon skirt and a pair of beaded earrings – a gift rooted in culture and love.
Although my mum was not Indigenous, she had a deep respect for my culture and the relationships and responsibilities that guide Indigenous life. She knew that ribbon skirts aren’t just clothing but carry story and express identity. In commissioning that skirt and those earrings, she aligned herself with the values she saw me living – reciprocity, kinship and honouring those who create beauty in our communities. Losing both her and the student who crafted them has layered my grief in ways I am still learning to navigate.
Grief doesn’t move in straight lines, it’s circular and relational, resurfacing when you least expect it. This year reminded me how teaching and learning are never separate from life. Being trauma-aware means caring for students but also acknowledging the emotions that we as educators bring into the space. Our experiences and grief can shape the classroom.
When this student died, my heart split open all over again and I could not continue my teaching as planned. I had to make changes to my syllabus in my Indigenous Representations in Film class – removing films that mirrored this student’s experience in certain ways. As I explained to close colleagues, “I cannot ask my students to sit with material that I’m not able to responsibly guide them through right now.”
What I have come to realise is that my own grief is not separate from the institution – it is shaped by it, and shapes it in return. When we lose students, when we lose colleagues, when programmes are cut or support is withdrawn, we aren’t just mourning the absence of people or resources – we are grieving the futures they represented. Just as ribbon skirts carry stories, so too did these relationships and initiatives carry possibility. Their loss is a rupture in the fabric of the university.
And yet, as with all grief, there is also a kind of invitation: to slow down, to notice what’s missing, to ask whose labour is being invisibly stretched to hold the weight of what’s been lost. In this way, grief becomes not just private sorrow but a tool – a lens through which we can more clearly see the cost of constant restructuring, the toll of austerity and the quiet erosion of care in academic life.
So perhaps what grief offers us, if we let it, is not just a call to mourn but a call to imagine differently; teach in ways that nurture connection, lead in ways that make room for vulnerability, and to rebuild institutions that understand the value of what cannot be easily measured or quickly replaced. Grief, in this sense, is not simply an ending. It is an insistence on remembering that what we do here matters – and so do the people we’ve lost along the way.
If you’re teaching through loss – personal or institutional – consider:
- Work can distract from but does not dispel grief. Productivity may be rewarded but is not the same as healing.
- Grief affects capacity for educators and students alike. Adjust expectations accordingly.
- Be willing to accept help. Grief does not need to be carried alone, and teaching is not a solitary endeavour.
- Acknowledging loss does not weaken the institution or you as an educator. Our students can learn so much by how we model vulnerability and engage during times of rupture.
Rachelle McKay is educational developer, Indigenous knowledges & ways of knowing at Dalhousie University’s Centre for Learning and Teaching and teaches in the Indigenous studies programme.
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