A Rapidly Changing World of Death Care
Staying aware and informed about new deathcare options can be hard for funeral professionals today because the landscape of our profession is evolving faster than ever before. Death care options remained predominantly unchanged for most of the 20th century. However, over the last decade, we’ve seen a surge of change in the death care space fueled by a pandemic, social movements, changing customer preferences, independent consumer research online, and new technologies. These phenomena have ushered in radical new options accompanied by curious families with different needs than those in the past. However, until now, continuing education for funeral directors has not evolved as quickly as the death care profession itself.
The Problem with Today’s Continuing Education for Funeral Directors
Despite these rapid changes to the death care space, continuing education for funeral directors has largely remained limited and stagnant. Even though the landscape of our profession is evolving quickly today, most death care professionals are trained primarily on traditional funeral options and practices. Plus, the continuing education for funeral directors that is most readily available at conferences is either hard to access because of scheduling and cost, or content that covers the same old topics that have been covered hundreds of times before.
For these reasons, many funeral directors remain accustomed to the standardized options they learned about in mortuary school, and some still have outdated personal opinions about what families want, and caring for the deceased. For those professionals, the last ten years and the desires of younger generations of death planners may feel shocking. No death care professional should be put in a situation where a family knows more about a new death option than they do. And yet, continuing education for funeral directors doesn’t always prepare us to understand how to meet the modern family where they are in their funeral planning needs.
Introducing: Death Curious Education
That’s why Death Curious– the brand that brought you articles like Will Cremation Kill our Zombie Fantasies and the Death Curious Podcast– is launching a new continuing education platform for funeral professionals and beyond, called Death Curious Education. We believe funeral professionals deserve relevant, accessible, forward-thinking CE that explores contemporary issues and expands our profession into the future. Quality continuing education should make new death care options less scary, and help traditionally trained funeral professionals integrate innovation into their current death care practices seamlessly. Death Curious continuing education courses are based on thorough academic and social research, explaining the why, not just the what, of cutting-edge death care.
Death Curious Education is a continuing education platform for death care exploration by forward-thinking people. We imagine a future in which quality CE is accessible, relevant, and revolutionary in the death care profession. With Death Curious Education, our goal is to help you better understand today’s evolving death care landscape, confidently serve modern death-planning families with cutting-edge funeral options, and become part of a supportive community of professional mortality explorers. We want funeral director continuing education to be fun, not just an obligation to get through year after year. Visually appealing videos and thought-provoking topics are just the beginning of what you’ll get from Death Curious Education.
Available Now: “Death Queerious Course 1: Why the LGBTQIA+ Community Needs Special Consideration in Funeral Care”
Death Curious Education is excited to announce that our first CE course, Death Queerious Course 1: Why the LGBTQIA+ Community Needs Special Consideration in Funeral Care, will be available for purchase starting on February 26th, 2024. This course provides practical information, data, tools, vocabulary, and resources for equitable and queer-inclusive funeral services. The course includes research that reveals why the queer community needs specialized death care, an explanation of queer-inclusive language, useful information about protecting trans identities after death, and tools for how to be an ally at work. The knowledge gained from this course will help the LGBTQIA+ families you work with feel safer and more comfortable in your care, and will strengthen your funeral home’s relationship with your local LGBTQIA+ community. Death Queerious Course 1 is the first in a three-part series designed to help funeral professionals work with queer families. These courses are all online and asynchronous so that you can complete them on your own schedule, and take in the information in a way that suits your learning style.
The course is available for purchase on the Death Curious Education website.
Connecting Directors readers get 15% off Death Queerious Course 1. Use the code CD15 at check out on the Death Curious Education website. This discount is for 7 days only! February 27th – March 11th.
The “Death Queerious” course series is written and created by Aries Jo (they/them), Director of Outreach and Education at Parting Stone. Aries holds an MFA, is a certified celebrant, and is working towards their Thanatology certification. Aries is a first-generation deathcare professional with four years of experience creating forward-thinking content and research for the funeral profession. They produce and host the Death Curious podcast and have written for many industry publications including Connecting Directors, the NFDA Blog, CANA’s Cremation Logs Blog, and American Cemetery and Cremation magazine. Aries also gives continuing education lectures on innovation in the funeral profession at death care conferences nationwide and provides peer-support coaching, grief, and relationship mentoring with the Intrepid Therapy Collective. They have created the Death Queerious series based on their own experiences as a queer death care professional. Aries Jo is a certified provider through the Academy for Professional Funeral Service Practice. APFSP is accredited in the following states: APFSP-accredited courses are approved for CE credit in the following states: Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Washington DC, Louisana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island.
Get Death Curious Education!
Continuing Education for funeral directors should be relevant, accessible, and entertaining. Death Curious Education CE courses are designed to help funeral directors meet modern families exactly where they are in funeral planning. Death Curious Education is bringing funeral director continuing education into the 21st century, and we can’t wait for you to join us.
Death Curious is offering a limited time 15% off discount to Connecting Directors readers. Use the code CD15 to get 15% off our first course on deathcuriouseducation.com only through March 11th!
