An Empty Seat in Class: Teaching and Learning After the Death of a Student

Powerful and poignant. Rick Ayers and the contributors to this book created a text that dives into what it means to teach, to love m, and to be in community. Highly recommended if you are an educator and/or someone who has lost a beloved young person in your life.

Very accessible and filled with many useful insights for classroom teachers as well as teacher educators.

I had the immense privilege of reading a draft of Rick Ayers's new book last spring. I started reading it at 2 in the morning on my friend's couch in Santa Cruz and I stayed up all night reading, crying, + feeling immensely grateful for the sheer humanity + unruly love beating as the heart of this project (+ radiating out far beyond it). Rick is an exceptional educator + a glorious human being. CAS teachers are bright lights + blessings. This book is a fantastic + crucial reminder that life is at times quite harrowing + can be exceptionally, uncompromisingly difficult, but love is also real, + equally present within each moment, as an open, living, breathing, choice. The intertwining of sorrow and love is an exquisite agony, but it is also a braid of power that weaves through (+ as) the broken pieces of our hearts, acting as the glowing impetus for genuine structural transformation + the overhauling of old, out-dated ways of educating + coming together as community. This is a book of great importance + humble grace. It is infused with the lived truth of many, many people who have been courageous enough to accept that we all lose our authority in the face of both death + love, but that we may be melded in that mystery into agents of far greater power. Through loss we come to our humanity, through our humanity we come to the subversive force of our inherent being-ness, only through + out of which the world may heal + return to its heart. Good words, phenomenal intentions, amazing people. In short: Go read it. Even if you don't teach.

A trTruly a book I wish was written years ago. As a teacher whose been to at least a funeral of a young person each year of my teaching career, this book gave me space to reflect on the impact those experiences has had on me and my students. Not a prescribed how-to guide nor is it a theoretical analysis of the causes of youth death, but it encapsulates one teachers story to deal with the death of a student and all the lessons and deeply impactful teachings that can come through that process. Offering a sobering reminder to us teachers working with those students in historically marginalized communities, that we are impacted by the loss of a student regardless of the institutional, bureaucratic, or even oppressive conditions we teach under we must find space to reflect, grow, and build within these times. This book should be read by all future, former, and current teachers, it brings up an area NEVER discussed in teacher education programs, and never in the news discourse when it comes to youth on youth violence, youth suicide, or school shootings. Truly Inspiring work.