Classroom Caffeine
Classroom Caffeine
Stories-To-Live-By with Kristin Valle Geren
Bridging climate science and the classroom can start with a simple walk to a place that matters. In this episode, we talk with Kristin Valle Geren—former elementary teacher, now a doctoral candidate and research assistant with the Stories-To-Live-By collective—to explore how story and place help children make sense of climate change in their own communities.
Kristen shares how “Explorers Club” invites elementary students to read the world around them: snapping photos by the Hillsborough River, mapping school grounds, composing social media-style videos, and asking the questions adults often miss. A small linguistic shift—asking what “matters” rather than what’s “important”—unlocks personal stories and genuine curiosity, turning observations into research and narratives.
From Hurricane Irma’s lingering impact in the Florida Keys to slow, uneven recovery across tourism economies, we trace climate as a lived, local reality that shows up in housing, work, and daily routines—not just in headlines.
If you’re curious about how you might integrate climate literacy without overhauling your curriculum, this conversation offers concrete moves, hope, and a path forward rooted in eco-justice, local knowledge, and the everyday literacies students already use.
Kristin Valle Geren is a doctoral candidate in the Literacy Studies program in the College of Education at the University of South Florida and the Graduate Research Assistant for the Stories-to-Live-by Collective.
Before beginning her doctoral studies, Kristin taught elementary school and worked as a literacy coach in Tampa, Florida. Specifically, she worked in the community where she now engages in community-based educational research in an after school program with elementary-aged youth.
As a child, Kristin’s family moved often due to her father’s military service, but she has lived in Florida for over 20 years now - all of her adult life. She came to the Stories-to-Live-By project through her interest in the ways children and teachers make sense of the places in which they live and teach and the possibilities of placemaking literacies for exploring issues of climate crisis.
You can read about Kristin and Alex's collaborative work here:
Geren, K. V., & Panos, A. (2025). Perspectives on Practice: A Walk along Our River: Naming and Placing as a Start to Climate and Ecojustice Literacies Inquiry. Language Arts, 102(4), 274–278. https://doi.org/10.58680/la20251024190
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Education research has a problem. The work of brilliant researchers often doesn't reach the practice of brilliant teachers. Over the years, we've also talked about how the work of brilliant teachers often does not inform the work of education researchers. In this special series of Classroom Caffeine, in collaboration with the Stories to Live by Collective, we highlight this group of K-12 teachers from across the state of Florida and former teachers, now in higher education, who are working together to sense make and take action. We talk with educators and researchers who are working together to explore how literacy teaching can respond to the climate crisis. Since 2021, they have gathered in person and online to write, make art, share stories, and reflect on how climate change is shaping our classrooms and communities. Supported by grants and partnerships, they hold regular workshops and virtual meetings, creating space for teachers to learn from one another while navigating challenges like book bans, censorship laws, and the realities of living through major hurricanes. Through this work, the group is studying how teachers use stories, place-based activities, and multimodal composing to bring climate change into English language arts classrooms. Their collaborative research asks, how do teachers tell stories about climate change? How do they navigate the political, social, and environmental pressures of their schools? And how can they build new literacies that prepare young people for more just and livable futures? In each episode of this special series, we talk with a collaborator in the Stories to Live By Collective about their experiences, connections, and learning through this work together.
Lindsay Persohn:Kristen Valle Geren is a doctoral candidate in the Literacy Studies Program in the College of Education at the University of South Florida and the graduate research assistant for the Stories to Live By Collective. Before beginning her doctoral studies, Kristin taught elementary school and worked as a literacy coach in Tampa, Florida. Specifically, she worked in the community where she now engages in community-based educational research in an afterschool program with elementary-aged youth. As a child, Kristin's family moved often due to her father's military service, but she's now lived in Florida for over 20 years, all of her adult life. She came to the Stories to Live by Project through her interest in the ways children and teachers make sense of the places in which they live and teach, and the possibilities of placemaking literacies for exploring issues of climate crisis. So pour a cup of your favorite drink and join me, your host, Lindsay Persohn, for this special series of classroom caffeine. Stories to live by that are sure to energize your thinking and your teaching practice.
Lindsay Persohn:Kristin, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show.
Kristin Valle Geren:Thanks so much for having me, Lindsay.
Lindsay Persohn:So from your own experiences, will you share with us one or two moments that inform your thinking about climate literacies and climate education?
Kristin Valle Geren:Sure. Um, so what comes to mind first personally is uh my family's experiences with Hurricane Irma in 2017. Although I didn't really realize it at the time, it was a really pivotal moment that made an impact on how I come to think about issues of climate crisis broadly and the way like story they're connected to these problems in complex ways. So my parents live in Cudjoe Key, which was the spot of landfall for what was a category four hurricane. And although their house and their neighborhood sustained damage, it took years to fully repair, it was actually the experience with my younger brother that I remember a lot when I think about the storm and socio-ecological issues. So, like many other residents of the Florida Keys, he works in hospitality and the impacts of the storm are both ecological, his apartment didn't survive the storm, and financial. The economy of the Florida Keys is heavily reliant on tourism. And its workers, like my brother, who make the tourism happen, are also the ones who are most at risk when faced with an environmental disaster like a hurricane. So even in a place that's often thought of as like paradise, these people experience climate impacts in much more damaging ways than other people. At the time, I didn't truly grasp the larger socioscientific issues at play. I didn't really see it as an issue of eco-justice. And I didn't have the words for that. But and I did understand that this experience was just like one small slice of what environmental injustice looks like. But as I continued to reflect and learn, I see how environmental disasters like hurricanes are much more complex than the damage sustained by wind and rain.
Kristin Valle Geren:And second, I think about a walk that I, along with my mentor and co-researcher, Dr. Alexandra Panos, and who was the principal investigator of the Stories To Live By project, took with some elementary aged kids after school a few years ago. So we visited a small city park, which is just a few minutes from their neighborhood community center where we work with them, and we took a walk along the Hillsborough River. When we were preparing for the walk, we asked them if they had any stories or questions about the river. You know, we thought they were gonna have tons. The river runs right adjacent to their neighborhood, and they were not interested at all. They had nothing to say. But when we actually went and walked with them, it was a completely different experience. There were many memorable moments during the walk, but I left realizing how moving with children in places and letting them draw on their authentic literacies like storytelling, unprompted social media style video composing and questioning can provide meaningful experiences for children to explore the world in places that matter, and that these types of invitations are an important way to approach climate literacies with children.
Lindsay Persohn:You've already shared with us so many important things. I think, you know, we when we talk about how changes in the climate impact us, you know, we think about it on an individual level and we think about it on a community or even a more global kind of level. But I think to go even further into those individual experiences of all the different ways in which, like it's not just this event, and then we sort of move on. But particularly, I think, in the story of your brother and many people like him, it not only impacted his living situation, but then it also the economic impacts affect one's ability to recover. We know like recovery is slow, cleanup is slow because there's so much that has to be done. And when you're talking about structures that have been, you know, made uninhabitable from these storms, then what, right? For the people who live there. And, you know, when you live there, your life is there. And so it changes really the shape of your entire life. And I think that that that's something that, you know, we kind of gloss over a lot of those stories. There's always there's so much news to attend to. So initially you hear about a storm, but then all the things that happen afterwards tracing that recovery, it's so long. And that actually connects to something you were saying about walking with kids, because I know even recently I have seen stories on social media about Hurricane Helene and how it's impacted the Asheville area, which of course, they're you know, huge in tourism as well. And to see people walking through those spaces, like it was actually this old house. They posted something about how they're they're working on a couple of different structures there. But if you think about an entity like this old house, you know, it's been around forever and they they do such cool things, even a group like that is only able to support, you know, a couple of properties. And so recovery is infinitely slow. And to see their videos of them walking through those spaces and to see even now, a year later, what they look like, right? You're talking about still piles of rubble. You're talking about destroyed cars, destroyed buildings next to buildings that are still standing, right? So that's the other thing, like making sense of all of that trauma at the same time. Why did my house survive when my neighbors didn't? You know, those sorts of things. It's just so much. And then back to this idea of walking with kids, I love the the walks that you all do. And I think it's so cool to see what particular spaces and places mean to people, especially when they may not necessarily think of it in those ways. So, you know, you're talking about kids composing on social media, those impromptu sorts of things that show you what places mean to them. It's just, it's such a rich way to explore a place and to hear stories and to um elicit memories and connections. And also, I think future-oriented thinking, right? Like there are ways to do that as well with what seems to be a simple walk to the river.
Kristin Valle Geren:Absolutely. And I think um one of the things we learned is, you know, you learn so much more about what matters to people when you actually move with them than, you know, when we asked a third grader what stories they have about the river and they didn't have anything to share. So I think it can help bridge that gap, which is actually what I'll talk about in the next session. Great, great.
Lindsay Persohn:So yeah, on that note, um, what do you want listeners to know about your work related to climate literacies?
Kristin Valle Geren:For me, the entry point has been centering places that matter. So to children, to teachers that we work with. And we've done walks with the teachers that we work with in the Story Silver project as well, um, and have found that really meaningful. But as I mentioned, we've been working with elementary age children during an after-school program at a local community center, which is in partnership with the Tampa Housing Authority for a few years now. But my interest and like our connection to this space began with me just wanting to know more about this specific community where I taught before and during my PhD program. And so for me at first, I was just interested in learning more about the community and what the kids learned about. So through what we call Explorers Club, because Placemaking Club didn't sound very cool, we have invited children to explore places that matter to them. So we've explored places like their community center, their neighborhood, their schools, and the river, which as I mentioned runs adjacent to where they live. And the more we invite children to engage in uh different, as we call them, placemaking literacy invitations, the more I've learned not only about what kids care about, but also just how connected issues of climate are to local experiences and the way kids move through and make sense of their world. So, for example, when we walked in the river, kids noticed issues of access, asking us like who lives in those big houses across the river? Um, or questions about pollution, why is there trash in the river, why does it look dirty here? Or um, some of them are really particularly attending to change, like asking why their neighborhood has changed over time and why, or um why different buildings have been built, or how the hurricane has changed the river. Um and so in my work, I approach climate literacies as always intertwined with local context and place-based understandings.
Lindsay Persohn:I would love to hear you say more about that because I think that for me, you know, I'm still making sense of what place-based literacies are all about. And I think for myself, I can situate that in some of the work that I do in my local community around historic preservation. We have a really rich history, and so preserving those spaces and places is really important to me. And that's helped me to better understand the work that you all have been doing. But I would love to hear more about kind of what you've learned and what what else has sparked from those walks, what kinds of conversations? How do you continue that work? And I'll also say I think it's just it's so valuable that we talk to kids about what matters to them. You know, I think there's so much messaging in the world that conveys, you know, kids don't know much, they're not doing well at school, you know, all those really negative things. But when you talk to kids, you learn that the reality is so different than that.
Kristin Valle Geren:Um, I think the first thing is just giving space for children. So as a teacher, it was very hard at first for me to just like give them space to move in ways that they want to move and let them explore in the ways that they want to explore. But once we do that, we have realized that like things come up naturally. They have conversations with each other, they tell you stories that they would have never told you if you're not walking with them, or they do things like take pictures. We have old school digital cameras that they really like to use, or um, they've made maps, and then they take those ideas and they can do things like research. Like um last spring, some of the students were interested in how does the hurricane affect the river? So they were doing some research into that. Um, some of them wanted to know like where the river flows because it's a really, really big river. So they wanted to know how it looks in different places. So just being able to build off of those things that they're interested in naturally. And the other thing um that sounds really silly, but that we learned right away is this word mattering is really important. So at the beginning, we tried to ask them what's important to you or places that are important, and we got a lot of like facts, like trees give us oxygen, or this school is here to help us learn, but not things that were like their stories or the things that they found invaluable. And so when we changed it to the word matter, it really shifted the way that they made sense of places that we were in together. Um, and I wasn't expecting that, but it was a really interesting learning. And I think like just yesterday we started with a new group, some of them are the same, but a new group of kids, and we took our first walk again to the to the river, and we just walked, we didn't do anything else. And while we were walking, kids were picking up little rocks and saying maybe this is a meteor, or asking, like, did the hurricane damage this part of the road here? Or when did this tree come down? And then they're also telling stories. One time my cousin and I came down here and this happened. And so I think just giving children space, and it doesn't have to be, I know in classrooms you don't have to, you're not walking to a river, but I've walked with children around their schools and learned many, many things about what matters to them in their school. So I think just centering places that matter to children or to teachers in our work with the teachers is just like a really valuable way to begin this kind of work because that's one of the things that I think about a lot is that this is really hard to just start. And not everybody can do everything. And it's okay to just start with what you can start with. So whether that's just going outside, one of the first things we did is sensory noticings. What do you hear? What do you see? What do you um feel? And a lot of them at the river wrote how calm they felt and how much joy they felt and how happy they were, but some of them smelled oxygen or other things like that. So I think just finding those ways to investigate or to think about the places where you are can be enough. And it's a place to start.
Lindsay Persohn:So I I think, you know, we're we're talking about how much places matter, but I think what your your point is well made that words really matter also, right? And I think sometimes we don't know what words will connect with anyone, um, particularly young people. But it's interesting that whenever you ask them what is important, it sounds as though they more or less relayed things that they thought might be important to others. Yes. When you ask what matters, that's a much more relational kind of term, right? Because it's what matters to you or to me. It becomes much more personal rather than this sort of idea of like detached kind of facts, right? So really interesting. I feel like those are the twists and turns in research that you can't quite anticipate, and you sort of just have to follow it where it goes, right? Because I I probably would have started in the same place. What's important and yeah, what matters is a much more personal kind of feeling. So, Kristin, given the challenges of today's educational climate, what message do you want other teachers to hear?
Kristin Valle Geren:What you are able to do is enough. So sometimes I can feel overwhelming to think about how to fit big issues like climate literacies into everything else that is asked to teach us every day, especially when faced with constantly changing curve gum policies or mandates that come at classrooms from all directions. Um, from my own experiences too, it's easy to feel guilt or frustration when you see all these other cool things that other educators are able to do, and you might be struggling to even find a way to start thinking about these things. So I think finding a way to begin, whether that's reading a book, answering a child's question after a hurricane, taking a walk outside the school with your students is enough. And the second message I want teachers to hear is to find your people. So I've learned so much from the teachers in this project. So just being in a space together, listening to them share and getting to be just a small part of this collective has made a huge impact. So again, what you're doing is enough and you don't have to do it alone.
Lindsay Persohn:That's so important. And I feel like that message for teachers could apply in pretty much every situation when it comes to education these days. Um, there is so much. There's so much to take in. It reminds me of what we were talking about at the beginning of our conversation, just that overwhelming nature of what happens, you know, with with the acts of climate change, with hurricanes in particular. And I think that there's something about education right now that feels a little bit like a storm that we're all weathering. And so the message that what you're able to do is enough, I think is very comforting because I think there's a tendency for teachers in particular to feel like it's never enough. Whatever we do is never enough, but it is. And I think we need to start internalizing that message, right? That all we can do is all we can do. So thanks so much for spending some time with me today, Kristin. Thanks again for having me. By centering teachers' experiences and creativity, the Stories to Live By collective reimagines literacy education as a powerful way to engage with the climate crisis. Together, members of this collective are showing how stories and teaching practices rooted in place can help communities respond to climate change while nurturing hope, justice, and resilience for future generations. If you have an interest in joining this group, please reach out to Dr. Alexandra Panos, Associate Professor of Literacy Studies at the University of South Florida at ampanos@ usf.edu. That's ampanos@usf.edu.