Purpose: The purpose of this assignment is for you to reflect on your personal and/or professional experiences with death, grief and bereavement and to integrate your life experiences with what you have learned during this course. Unlike the Discussion Board assignment which focuses on discussions about issues based on facts, the Deathography Paper is a more personal assignment. You have the opportunity with the Deathography to examine your personal attitudes and experiences without needing to substantiate it with references to the professional literature. As a future health educator (or whatever your future profession may be), you must have a reasonable level of self-awareness and be conscious of how your personal attitudes, beliefs, and experiences may affect others.
Instructions:
You will write an essay that details your experiences with loss and death in your life and your attitudes, opinions, and perceptions about various issues related to dying, death and grief. It will resemble an autobiography but it will focus on this one area.
I have attached a handout (“Exercises for Deathography assignment.doc”) containing a number of activities for you to do. This should help you when tackling this assignment. Please complete as many exercises in the handout as you can and incorporate all of this information in essay form.
If you wish to earn a good grade, I suggest you complete all of the exercises and provide as much detail as possible. Please do not just copy and paste these activities into a document and fill in the answers. If you do that, you will lose points. I want you to put all the information together in an organized and coherent manner. Identify themes or a chronology of events and experiences. You are to write an essay, not just answer each exercise. Again, complete the exercises on your own and then use this information to inform your Deathography. You do not have to attach the exercises to your paper.
In addition to writing about your attitudes and experiences, you can also identify issues that you have struggled with relating to this subject and how you think you can better address these issues in the future. You can talk about issues, events, people, books, movies etc that have influenced your way of thinking about death, grief and bereavement.
There are many ways you can go about doing this assignment.Be as creative as you want. Make it interesting. There are tons of resources out there to assist you with this assignment.You are writing about yourself, so make it a meaningful experience.
I have attached several sample student papers to give you an idea of how to go about writing this paper. These are good sample papers and represent “A” papers. They should give you a good sense of how to do this assignment and what you need to do if you are striving for excellence.
Your paper should be double-spaced with Times New Roman 12 pt font.
Use 1″ margins. No large gaps between paragraphs. Each paragraph should be joined to the next paragraph. Begin each paragraph by indenting it 0.3″.
