‘There is no right or wrong answer’: Swedish preschool teachers’ reflections on the didactics of death.

The study investigates what kindergarten teachers believe they can teach about death and how they plan their teaching on this topic. The aim is to explore how kindergarten teachers think about what, how, why and when they teach about death and death-related topics.

The results show that kindergarten teachers consider it important to teach about death because death is a fundamental part of life. They also believe that it is their job to comfort a child in grief. However, they often avoid teaching about death from a physical and scientific perspective. Instead, they use child-adapted and improvised teaching that aims to reassure and comfort the children. The content of the teaching arises from the intersection between talking about death as an irreversible consequence of natural processes and the kindergarten teachers' own beliefs and ideas about death and an afterlife. As a result, the understanding of death exists from a purely biological perspective, side by side with kindergarten teachers' own beliefs about an afterlife, reflecting a dualistic mindset in which culturally constructed beliefs coexist with biological points of view.

The data material consists of three focus group interviews with kindergarten teachers, with three to seven participants in each group. The interviews were recorded using video and audio recordings. The kindergarten teachers were asked to describe their previous experiences of working with existential questions, as well as how they dealt with questions about death in their daily work based on the children's interests and questions.

Puskás, T., Jeppsson, F. & Andersson, A. (2021). "‘There is no right or wrong answer’: Swedish preschool teachers’ reflections on the didactics of death". Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491211049480