“A relief, a beginning and a new hope”: reflections on death in a non-formal education space

Abstract

This article, presents reflections on an investigative experience with young people from a rural community undergoing religious training. The text is divided into three complementary parts: the first one reviews the literature on non-formal education, with emphasis on educational practices in a religious context; in the second, the hopeful bias of death is presented, based on the assumptions that guide Christian Eschatology; in the third, we qualitatively analyze the results of a workshop that aimed to promote an eschatological dialogue about death, as well as its implications for the meanings attributed by the participants to this borderline “event”. The findings of the analysis show that, immersed in this teaching and learning process, rural youths moved from a knowledge-experience surrounded by fear to a dimension in which dying is perceived as a rite of passage to eternal life. In addition, they denote the importance of knowing and respecting the variety of learning communities, in their form, methodological organization and social reason, opening the way for other themes and ways of thinking-doing research and/in Education.