The 7 Stages of Grieving - Sydney Opera House€¦ · the 7 stages of grief. Work in groups of 6...

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Creative Learning Journey Teacher Resources The 7 Stages of Grieving Stages 4 – 6

Transcript of The 7 Stages of Grieving - Sydney Opera House€¦ · the 7 stages of grief. Work in groups of 6...

Creative Learning Journey Teacher ResourcesThe 7 Stages of Grieving

Stages 4 – 6

TEACHING AND LEARNING

4

Drawing Feeling

As a class describe and define the following words exploring the subtleties between these feelings.

Grief Sorrow Loss Death Pain Distress Lament Mourn Emptiness Despair Lonely RegretMisfortune Guilt Passion Love

In what ways is grief different from sorrow? If emptiness were a colour what colour would it be? Why? If loneliness were a line how would it travel across a page? What is the most sorrowful sound you have ever heard? Explain. Is fierce passion light or dark?Does pain have a texture? Describe it.How would you describe the taste of regret?What shade of blue is despair?

Sometimes emotion defies language and is better expressed through marksand lines drawn on a page.

Choose 5 emotions and draw a graphite line to represent each one. Does sorrowmake you press your pencil hard into the page or roll lightly over it with hardly any strength? Is emptiness straight and long or does it wind around in circles? Is mourning soft edged and shaded, or sharp and jagged?

5

Automatic Writing - Grief

Automatic writing is a subconscious process that disrupts your intention as a writer. It is like pouring your brain onto the page in front of you and sifting through the scribbled debris to find meaning and relevance. Writers and artists often do this before beginning a new work to uncover ideas, memories and feelings that can inspire new projects.

Remove everything from your desk except for a pen and paper. Set a timer for 5 minutes and begin writing in response to the word grief without censoring your stream of conscious-ness. You could start with a sentence beginning ‘I feel......’ or ‘I remember......’ You might find yourself writing about a personal experience, or about the state of grief in more general terms. You might end up in an imaginative poetic space, or you might begin with loss and end with joy. The important thing is to trust the process and explore what is written onto the page without getting in the way by thinking too much. The Rules

1.Write silently 2.Write fast. 3.Don’t stop.

After 5 minutes take a moment to read through your stream of consciousness and underline words and sentences that are interesting, unusual or meaningfulto you. Collect the words on a separate page and use them to inspire a piece ofcreative writing titled I Feel Nothing.

Have you ever experienced something so intense that you were unable to feel anything? Is it possible to feel too much?

Note: Exploring feelings can potentially evoke strong or painful responses from students. Always offer alternatives if participants find that challenging feelings arise, or they would prefer not to participate.

“Between grief and nothing, I will take grief ” Willian Faulkner

5

Explore The Royal Botanic Garden.

*Take your shoes off and feel the grass between your toes.

*Lie down on your back in the shade and look up into the trees for a long time. Even when you feel like getting up stay a little bit longer. Imagine you are sinking into the ground or floating up into the branch-es. Breathe. Keep breathing. What stories are written into the soil and trees of gardens. What do you think it felt like to lie here 200 years ago?

*Follow the poetic pathways to find poems hidden by poets from The Red Room Company throughout the gardens. Find the New Shoots map below.

Visit: New Shoots – Poems inspired by plants. Listen: Poet Eric Avery - ‘Passage of Time’Discover: The indigenous heritage of The Royal Botanic Garden.

Untold Stories

Are there stories in your culture, your family or your own life that have never been told? What happens to a story that is covered by silence or forced to become a secret. Can you think of instances culturally where we ignore some people’s stories and celebrate others?

Write a monologue for a character whose story you think needs to be told. It can be fictional or inspired by someone you know. Consider a simple costume and a single object that represents the untold story, which you can use as a prop or minimal set. Learn your script and perform the monologue for your class.

“no grief like the grief that remains unspoken” Henry Wordsworth Longfellow

Stillness - Mindfulness Empathy Exercise

Mindfulness has the potential to enhance awareness, acceptance and empathy. On your journey to the Opera House to see 7 Stages of Grieving take 5 minutes to close your eyes and bring your attention to your breath.

How many breaths can you count before your mind starts wandering? Where in your body can you visualize your breath?

Each time you notice your mind has wandered bring your attention back to your breath. Then bring your awareness into the stillness of your body. Become as still as you possibly can so that the only movement in your body is each involuntary breath moving in and out of your nostrils. Rest in the stillness of your body becoming as quiet and unmoving as you are able. Look at the scenery out the window and imagine Aboriginal Australia before theinvasion. Imagine what life was like then for an indigenous teenager of your age

What do you think they would have been doing? How do you think life changed for them after white settlement? What would have been lost for them? If you are anAboriginal student think about your own ancestors and what you know of their experience. What would you like others to understand about your own experience as an indigenous Australian?

Think about empathy. Feel.

Reflection

How did you feel at the end of 7 Stages of Grieving?In what ways were you changed by the experience?What single theatrical moment do you remember most clearly?Which moments did you find difficult to watch?Why is storytelling important? How effective was the use of sand, dirt and stones in the set?How was technology used?

Navigating The 7 Stages of Grief

Grief and loss have many shades, tones and faces. They are not fixed emotions but complex and vast in their scope. In her book “On Death and Dying” Elizabeth Kubler-Ross identified a series of stages experienced by people consciously facing death. Since then many comparisons have been made with theexperience of dealing with significant grief and loss.

The 7 stages are:

- Shock or Disbelief- Denial- Anger- Bargaining- Guilt- Depression- Acceptance and Hope

Imagine you are creating a visual map to physically illustrate this journey through the 7 stages of grief. Work in groups of 6 and use a collection of naturalmaterials like sand, stones, shells, dirt, leaves and twigs to create a map-like installation of imagined pathways that might help someone navigate their way through the stages of grief.

Use the installation as a set for a non-verbal short performance piece in response to the 7 stages. It could be a movement piece driven by repeated or increasingly exaggerated gestures. Or a dance representing the journey from shock through to acceptance and hope.

Kin Role-play – The Ties that Bind Us By Travis De Vries – Culural Consultant

As a class:

1. Assign each student to play the part a different member of a family: Grand-mother, Grandfather, Father, Mother, Son, Daughter, Uncle, Aunty and Cousins.

2. Leave 2 students to the side, with no assigned role.

3. Have family group stand in a circle facing inwards. If enough students are pres-ent have multiple family groups with over lapping circles.

*Students: Think about how you feel about your family. What do they mean for you? What about home, what is the feeling of home?

1. Take a ball of string and give the end of it to the student playing the role of grandmother and then as you unroll the ball give it in turn to the daughter then the son, then grandfather and then back to the grandmother. 2. String ball is then passed through each member of the family until it is an inter-weaving pattern of connections.

Teachers Narration: The string represents the way traditional indigenous culture was/ is taught and the strength of family ties. The grandmother and grandfather hold the knowledge and pass it on the grandchildren. Your family had their own language, their own language, their own songs, dances, art and ceremony. This how Aboriginal people used to live, everything was connected.

1. Everyone holding the string closes his or her eyes.

2. The two students left to the side are then instructed silently to come through the group with scissors and cut the stringlines linking grandmother to granddaughter and grandfather to grandson.

3. Everyone opens his or her eyes.

*Discussion: What is missing? What do the students think has happened?

1. Everyone closes his or her eyes.

2. All other connections are cut.

*Discussion: How would it make you feel to suddenly be without connection to your family? Your own brothers, sisters and your parents? How would you feel if it was a choice that was forced upon you?

*Note: This exercise can be emotionallyconfronting for some people with priorexperiences of separation from familyand culture. Please be mindful.

1. The teacher nominates the students playing grandson and granddaughter and the two students who cut the strings.

2. Everyone closes his or her eyes again.

3. Nominated students move through the group. Some strings are retied while others are not.4. Everyone opens eyes again.

*Discussion: How do students feel about the string process? What did people lose? What needs to happen to make sure those ties are repaired?

Wreck Con Silly Nation – Reconciliation

Discussion

How would you describe reconciliation? What does the way Wreck Con Silly Nation from the play, add to the mean-ing of reconciliation?What does reconciliation mean to you?In what ways is storytelling important to reconciliation? What needs to happen in order to heal connections that have been severed?What do you see as the main challenges preventing reconciliation? Whose responsibility is it to address these challenges? How can you contribute to reconciliation in practical ways in your own life?

Explore: Resources from Reconciliation Australia

Sydney Opera HouseCreative LearningBennelong PointSydney NSW 2000AustraliaT 61 2 9250 7770sydneyoperahouse.com/CreativeLearning

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