Classroom Caffeine
Classroom Caffeine
A Stories-To-Live-By Conversation with John Eric Vona
Eric Vona describes how project-based learning can guide students from broad worries to focused, researchable questions that lead to local solutions. He talks about place-based writing born during remote learning, then shows how journalism practices—finding experts, crafting professional emails, conducting interviews—help students produce credible, public-facing work.
Literature becomes a springboard for ethics and action. Pairing Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas with contemporary responses opens honest talk about comfort, cost, and justice—conversations that translate directly to climate realities.
Eric also spotlights The Echo, a teen literary magazine turned nonprofit, where students serve as real editors, publish global youth voices, and record audio for accessibility. It’s a model of authentic learning that lasts beyond a grading period and builds the very capacities communities need now: curiosity, collaboration, and clear communication.
John Eric Vona is a writer and educator living in Tampa, FL. Passionate about conservation and sustainability, he joined the Stories-To-Live-By project so that he could find ways to bring place-centered writing into his work as a high school AP Capstone Seminar and Creative Writing instructor. He is proud to be the advisor to The Echo: Teen Art & Lit Mag, which publishes the work of artists and writers from around the world aged 13-19. You can find The Echo at echolitmag.com/.
Other resources mentioned in this episode:
University of Oregon's Journalistic Learning Initiative can be found at https://journalisticlearning.org/.
To cite this episode:
Persohn, L. (Host). (2025,Nov 11). Stories-To-Live-By with John Eric Vona. (Season 6, No. 5) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/6C5D-9DA8-6973-6DE9-90CA-1
Connect with Classroom Caffeine at www.classroomcaffeine.com or on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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:In this episode, Eric Vona talks to us about inquiry-based learning as a path to exploring climate literacies and other real-world challenges young people face. John Eric Vona is a writer and educator living in Tampa, Florida. Passionate about conservation and sustainability, he joined the Stories to Live By Project so that he could find ways to bring place-centered writing into his work as a high school AP Capstone seminar and creative writing instructor. He is a proud advisor to The Echo, Teen Art and Lit Mag, which publishes the work of artists and writers from around the world, age 13 to 19. You can find The Echo at echo litmag.com. That's E-C H O L I T M A G dot C O M. 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. Eric, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show.
John Eric Vona:Hi, Lindsay. Thanks for having me.
Lindsay Persohn:So from your own experiences, will you share with us one or two moments that inform your thinking about climate literacies or climate education?
John Eric Vona:Well, I mean, I definitely make an approach of project-based learning. It's what I use in a lot of my classes. In creative writing, for me, that's one of the courses I teach. It looks like giving students an opportunity to be outside to explore the world around them and to write. This is something we've talked a lot about this last year with Stories to Live By is place-based writing, to explore their community, their neighborhood. And that's actually something I started during COVID. It was the first time I did that. They were all stuck inside. They were all on Zoom meetings. And I said, Your assignment's just to go in go in your backyard or take a walk around the neighborhood and write about that place or find a place where you can you can free write. And I think the actual assignment for that was for them to just send me a selfie of them writing somewhere outside. And that was cute to see my students again and and they really appreciated it. It was pretty low stakes. The other course I teach primarily is AP Seminar, which is the AP Capstone program. So schools that offer it, their students can take a certain number of AP classes and then they can take this two-year program, AP Seminar and AP research. And that allows them to get an AP diploma. It's sort of College Board's response to IB or some of these other things. But I I really enjoy teaching the first year of that capstone program. It's a it's a topics course. It's a course in research, writing, and presenting on their writing. And students have so much choice in what they're allowed to do within that program. They choose topics that are of interest to them. And I've found that there's a lot of ways to guide them towards looking at the problems related to the climate crisis. They choose topics naturally that are interested in that. Climate change is a broad umbrella of things that the students will find themselves interested in. And I can help them narrow that down to something that is actually researchable. Because part of the one of the cool things about that program is they they'll present solutions, right? You can't present a solution to the climate crisis. But we could we could talk about solutions to pollution in the Hillsborough River. You know what I mean? So for me, it's all about project-based learning and and giving them opportunities to explore kind of the local hard and fast impacts of climate change and of you know what there's other words we can use too, right? Conservation, right? So that's sort of my approach to the whole thing.
Lindsay Persohn:It sounds like a really wonderful way to help young people put together all of their learning and in this sort of self-driven way, which is an approach to learning that I take very often in my teaching and in youth camps and things like that, right? I mean, to me, that's what good instruction looks like. But we also know that it can be hard to do that inside of a lot of classrooms. But when we can, we do it, right?
John Eric Vona:Yes, yeah.
Lindsay Persohn:And I think you're to your point, giving your students options around climate education, climate literacies, there's so many different ways they can go with that. Like it is a local challenge, but it's not just about big weather patterns, right? It's about economic impacts. It's about social impacts. And so there are just so many different avenues that someone could follow as they're thinking about, you know, the impacts of a changing climate.
John Eric Vona:Yeah, to social and and economic impacts. A text that, or it could be a text, but it could also be a concept that I'll bring to my students is the tragedy of the commons. And that's not something that a mom for liberty is gonna come yelling at me about that I've brought up climate change in the classroom. I mean, because it goes back to Aristotle, I think. And, I had a philosophy minor in college. This idea that the common resources, particularly common natural resources, are the things that are going to be least cared for, right? Everybody is going to pull water from the river. Nobody is taking care of the river, whether it's because they assume somebody else is taking care of the river. And then this is a particularly salient issue in America where there's the constant push and pull of individuality versus the state, right? We are a nation that that values our independence, our individual liberty, our individual rights, our don't tread on me, right? But at the same time, who's going to take care of this issue, right? If it's not the community, right? And I think sometimes we we forget that community and government are so closely tied, which seems obvious, right? But I think in the emotions of political debate, we lose that.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah. I think we've lost sight of a lot of that, yes.
John Eric Vona:Sure. So having them encounter the tragedy of the commons is a is a way for students to begin thinking about natural resources, about community engagement, about local issues, perhaps without the the hurdle of we're gonna do a unit on climate change. Particularly in Florida.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, right, exactly. And it is really ironic to me that particularly living in Florida, and I think now, you know, the ways in which the climate is changing, it's impacting everyone, right? I mean, if you look at heat maps across the the United States, I mean let's just focus, you know, if we're just focusing on the United States, sure. We know there are so many impacts outside of that, but yeah, the the flooding, the extreme temperatures, tornadoes, you know, all those things that I think people are dealing with in ways they never have before or never anticipated in their lifetime. And so but I I love this idea of bringing it back to an old text that sort of sets up the problem, but really sets up the thinking around it. Because, like you said, it's not just introducing, like here we're gonna think about climate change, because I do think that there are still some spaces where there's pushback around that idea. But if instead you approach it from we all share these resources, what happens when we all take and no one is giving, right? And no one is really giving giving back or no one's really minding what the resource looks like. So yeah, I think that that's a super important idea and a great way to help your students launch into their own thinking.
John Eric Vona:Absolutely, right? And I'd like to, I kind of plugged college board, which doesn't need to be plugged, but there's another program that I got hooked up with right before I started with the stories that we live by project. And that was the Journalistic Leadership Institute out of the University of Oregon. This was something that was obscure to me, and I know they're trying to grow their program. So I would love to give them a shout out for their curriculum as some of the best that I've ever encountered. And I'm a very homebrew lesson plan kind of guy. I am a very, I'm gonna do it myself. I'm gonna make my own, and I've never this felt like I had made it. So
Lindsay Persohn:That's cool.
John Eric Vona:Yeah, it was really neat. So their program is designed for a six through twelve. There's a lot of modifications in there. And it is for journalism, but it's a way to bring a journalism project into you could you could do it in your English class, you could do it in your I I did it because I took over the school newspaper and I was like, I need help. And then I after a year of doing it, I was like, no, this is what I need to bring to my AP seminar students. The crux of it, the thing that the whole program pivots around is students conducting an interview with a local source, a local expert. It's so cool. And to see my students talk to somebody at the University of Tampa who an expert in in hurricanes, right? Right right after right after Milton, right? Because they wanted to do a story about that. They want, why did it intensify so rapidly? Why was it so unique that it came? And they, you know, I got to teach them how to find that person, how to write a professional email, how to coordinate that interview, and then do what we're doing now. And they did it in front of the class. So you have a you have a guest speaker, but I I was at my desk, and those three teenagers who came all dressed up with their questions talked to him while the rest of the class learned about it before they went and wrote their article. That was powerful, that was impactful.
Lindsay Persohn:Well, and you know, I I think this also speaks to the power of project-based learning, right? You know, you didn't say today we're gonna learn about how to write a professional email. That is our objective, but instead the project leads you to that objective. And then there is this real world sense of purpose around why we would even do that in the first place. So right, it's it's not my teacher telling me to do this, but instead it is what the work calls for. And I think that in my experience, that is when learners take a lot of ownership over what they're doing. It's right, they're driven to know how to do these things. And it's not because it's our purpose, it's theirs.
John Eric Vona:Sure. Yeah. I mean, uh to go back to something very basic, I internalize this as a teacher with grammar instruction early on in my career because I never learned any grammar from a worksheet that my seventh grade teacher gave me. Right. And when I became a teacher myself, I I started that doing that because it was the only thing I had seen and was like, why am I doing the thing that I hated? And it did not take all right, it did not take a lot of research for me to be like, oh, I should be teaching this in the frame of editing. Oh, that's when I actually as a and I do professional editing now, and I'm like, oh, that's uh that's when I learned it, when I had to learn it because it mattered for my own writing, for the writing I was working on. So that's exactly what you're talking about, right? I didn't say now we're going to learn a professional email. No, the students needed to write a professional email. I said contact the guy, and they went, wow. And I was, I got you. You show you how to do it.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, well, let's do this together. Yeah, that's cool.
John Eric Vona:And JLI had resources for that.
Lindsay Persohn:That's perfect. As you were talking about the Journalistic Leadership Institute, I was thinking that it might be really useful if we linked to that in your show notes in case anyone is interested in exploring those materials. Because I could certainly see that, I mean, this would be applicable in a wide range of classrooms, you know, civics, you know, for sure, those kinds of things. But I think there are a lot of other connections as well. I could even see it in agriculture courses, you know, those sorts of things where you might also be exploring issues and looking to inform the public about them.
John Eric Vona:They had a lot of stuff on their website and their program about teachers using it in in a wide variety of classes, you know, ESOL classes and I think there was like a foreign language teacher who was using it. So absolutely. Yeah, it was it was it was very versatile. I don't think that there's probably fewer and fewer journalism electives out there, unfortunately, in the in our country. And this was a way for students to encounter journalism and be journalists, perhaps without having to take a journalism class.
Lindsay Persohn:Great. Yeah. I mean, I think especially these days, I feel like a lot of what we do is somewhat journalistic. You know, we're we're regurgitating news to our friends and talking with our family about what's going on and having some of those mindsets and those approaches are, I think, are just really critical. So yeah, we'll definitely link to that in your show notes.
John Eric Vona:Cool. Yeah.
Lindsay Persohn:Great. So you've already shared with us quite a bit related to this next question, but I'll go ahead and ask it directly anyway. What do you want listeners to know about your work related to climate literacies?
John Eric Vona:My work sounds very large. You know what I'm saying?
Lindsay Persohn:But it is, it's important stuff.
John Eric Vona:I've prided myself at being a teacher, an on the ground teacher. You know what I mean? I have deliberately chosen not to go the route of academia or of theory or of god forbid administration. Because I I want to be right there in the classroom with students. And I think any students encounter issues related to the climate. I don't think that it has to be in a specialized class, or that you have to have students with a special interest, or that you have to have the cream of the crop students. At my school, that's what AP Seminar is. And it does not have to be that way, right? So when I teach my AP Seminar class and and you know the other teachers come and guidance council come to see the presentations, and they're like, oh my gosh, they're right, they're looking at heat maps, or they're they're looking at at some really intensive stuff. It doesn't have to be that. There are lots of ways to to talk meaningfully and and and deeply about what's going on in the world around them. I think most of them are are interested in in in one way or another. I think back to when I took over some, I'm gonna do air quotes useful on a podcast, right? Lower level students. Yeah, lower level, I hate that term. And I took over some what we call them in our district fused classes or the inclusion classes, right? At one point. And I think the the closest thing I got to climate literacy with them and with doing something that was really higher order and challenging was when I had them read U rsula Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Should I explain the ones who walk away from Omelas?
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, give it give a little premise there, a little context for it.
John Eric Vona:Okay. It's a short story. I believe it was written in the 60s or 70s, won a lot of awards, well known in the science fiction community, and I feel like also in the philosophy community, but there's I still encounter plenty of people who don't know the ones who walk away from omelas. In it, uh Le Guin gives us a picture of a city in celebration. She gives us a city in in joy. They're they're they're partying in the streets, every day is perfect, it's a parade, they're feasting, they're doing drugs, they're having orgies, they're doing the whole thing, right? It's utopia. And underneath that is a child being neglected. A child locked in a room in utter despair, and everybody in the city knows about the kid. And without the child being neglected, being abused, without this this sad childhood, the city would crumble, the party would end. It is the philosophical debate of what do you do? Right? And she presents us with an answer that some people can walk away from that. They can know about the child and say, not at that cost, I'll leave. Those are the ones who walk away from Omalos, OMALOS is the city. I was so fed up as a teacher with teaching dystopia. Teaching dystopian literature. It's just it's it's pervasive. And I also think it's it's simplistic in a way that's not useful to our students in the real world. I I may maybe this is just me, but I'm like, I don't think they're encountering Big Brother. I don't think they're encountering I know you could say they are. I think what they are encountering every day in America is a party. The land of abundance, right? Is is the the joy, right? The the festivities. But at what cost? What's being ignored for that? And that's that starts a conversation more about climate change, but about social justice, right?
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, yeah.
John Eric Vona:And so to do a unit on on utopianism or the idea of utopia, is that possible, right? Could could easily be segued into to anything, right? To them writing about issues they see in their community, issues of of the climate. I believe I paired it with a letter from a Birmingham jail. Probably one of the most commonly taught texts in America, but there's also some very cool that would you call it? A spinoff, a redux, response literary response to the ones who walk away from Omelas, if you want to do some contemporary texts. NK Jemison, she wrote something called The Ones Who Stay and Fight. It is a short story that directly directly references Omelos as like that other city. We're not like them. Another short story, I believe it just won the nebula. If it didn't, it should have. It was called Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole? And it was a very powerful story about political action, political violence. And I would if I was back in like an AP lit classroom, I would absolutely do it. So anytime I can bring in contemporary texts and contemporary stories, I do that over over classical. But that's a way that I feel like I'm giving my students chances to encounter something really deep and meaningful and philosophical, but that they can they can turn around and in a Socratic seminar, they can apply that to the real world. world and that can launch us into that project-based learning where they they tackle a topic of their their choosing.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, as you were describing the story and the conversations around it, I was thinking how neat it would be to invite your students to bring a short story or some other text that they relate back to that and then have a discussion about how they think it relates. Like to think about the ones who walk away from OMLOS and the letter from a Birmingham jail, and then to think about all of the ways in which one text more or less informs the other and how we can understand one in the context of another, I think that that would be such an interesting conversation with young people about the text that they might bring. It also gets them to read a lot of stuff in order to find find something that connects. But yeah, that's cool.
John Eric Vona:And to go back to my soapbox from earlier, I did that with quote unquote low-level students. Because they're not these are human beings. So much to offer yeah so much to offer deep think absolutely I mean we were having philosophical discussions in the old six period class there. It was great.
Lindsay Persohn:I love that message that this critical work this work of sort of understanding the world through text I think that's such an important point because it it it is for everyone, right? This is not reserved for the most elite students. This is for everyone. This work is for everyone. And it has to be otherwise to go back to what you were telling us from the Journalism Leadership Institute, if no one is minding these things or if we are all just benefiting then you know who who is minding the resource? Who is making the connections is there anything else you want to tell us about your work, Eric?
John Eric Vona:I don't know if it relates to climate literacy, but if I could shout out echolitmag.com the the other thing I do, which I it's it sound the other thing I do. This is like my main this this is my main jam is it's a literary magazine that my students put out. And uh we did it for 10 years. A few years ago four I think four or five now a professor at the University of North Florida spoke to them and was like wow you guys are really good at this you should not just be publishing what your students publish. You're ready to become part of the broader literary community. And so that involved a lot of things but step one was calling up my old editors and saying do you guys want to help like make a organization outside of the school because the school wasn't going to school it's a literary magazine the school wasn't going to pay for anything or so the Echo is now owned by the former students. It is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. I just called up the kids who are now you know grown up you know the our president our board president is a PhD candidate at I think it's Northwestern. He's in Chicago. We've been going strong for four or five years now and accepting work from teens all over the world.
Lindsay Persohn:It's amazing.
John Eric Vona:It's it's awesome. It's so much fun and it's so meaningful so many times when you're making a literary magazine as a at a at the high school level it's just the editor putting in their poems or or some one kid begging the other kids in creative writing to do something. And we've taken that aspect out of it and now like my students are like real editors like reviewing submissions from around the world. And I think this week they've got a story coming out from I know and it's summertime and we're still publishing um we've got a story coming out uh that was sent to us from Sydney Australia a short story they did. And they have a they podcast the story they record the stories and poems as an accessibility thing. So that's echo litmag.com tell your kids to submit to us it's like my pride and joy.
Lindsay Persohn:It's amazing. I mean and I think it's just it's another testament to what project based learning and really project based thinking can do.
John Eric Vona:It's project based learning the max because we talk about students taking ownership over their learning.
Lindsay Persohn:Right. Here you go
John Eric Vona:Literally like my my students are still involved it's an alumni run organization. I can't get rid of these kids you know.
Lindsay Persohn:Right that's incredible.
John Eric Vona:And and they come in all the time and teach the new staff members and the that's I'm I sit get to sit back and watch my former students on a regular basis come in and just take over and jump right in with like minded teenagers the the mentorship I'm I'm like the luckiest guy in the world that I've managed to do this and pull it off. So echo litmag.com
Lindsay Persohn:And we'll we'll post that in your show notes as well we'll post that link yeah.
John Eric Vona:There you go.
Lindsay Persohn:So Eric one more question for you. Given the challenges of today's educational climate what message yeah right what message do you want teachers to hear?
John Eric Vona:Don't let the bastards grind you down.
Lindsay Persohn:A good old literary reference there which I guess now is also a TV reference.
John Eric Vona:Oh yeah I never watched that I only read it like uh the true mark of a snooty English teacher is the sentence I just said so I'm really cautious actually like I said don't let the bastards grind you down and I have to like check my own male privilege on that one. So let me like I
Lindsay Persohn:Say more say more
John Eric Vona:I will be happy to say more. This will be my land acknowledgement but it's for gender. I definitely realized early on in my career that I can get away with things that the many women in the English department around me cannot. I learned that lesson when I was doing successfully doing a banned book unit for years and having my kids read just whatever I suggested and parents would come to me and be like this is so great. You're challenging them we read it too and the instant the instant I passed that along to the other teachers at my level they were all getting called into the principal's office they were all getting in trouble they were all having these conferences and the superintendent was getting emailed how dare you make my kid read The Jungle or Clockwork Orange and I had a sit back moment where I was like oh my God this is this this is my male privilege as a teacher and in that way I don't know that I have advice for other teachers that are you know what I mean?
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah no I get that.
John Eric Vona:I Eric Vona gets away with it you know that's a and it's sad because I I want like make your kids do the thing do the project based learning and then I I see the women around me just attacked and it's when we talk about education being under attack I mean it's a it's it's a paint collar profession, right? And I'm like is this about education or is this about I I hate to paint in such a broad stroke but is this about America hating women and and that's tough. I know you get it I don't teach into the choir
Lindsay Persohn:But but you know other male teachers I've worked with in the past even working with my college students who are apprenticing into the teaching profession I have had my colleagues from schools say to you know the lone male student that I have basically that well you can get away with a lot. I mean those were his words you know you you don't have to be so careful you can get away with a whole lot and it is it is interesting especially like you said in a profession where where there are so many women traditionally and currently you know it is quote unquote woman's work. And so I think that it is a very it's an interesting maybe even if I can if I can kind of turn your message on its head perhaps it is a little bit of a message of solidarity because I think that what you encourage me to do and what hearing, you know, hearing your story, it does encourage me to think differently about how I can engage my students in projects. It encourages me to think about how you push those boundaries. You know I think we all have to find the space we can work within and for some people you know the tolerance for risk is quite low and for others it's quite high. And I think that if we all pull in the same direction that we are challenging students with real world thinking, real world text real world challenges and then supporting them to meet the goals that they set because it's what their project or what they're thinking, you know, it's that trajectory. I think if we all pull in that direction, perhaps there is a bit of space for us to make for a little bit more accepting educational climate for everyone.
John Eric Vona:I hope so because yeah absolutely it's intended to be solidarity right and I hope that we can find ways to to do everything you just said and to not let the bastards grind us down. You know but I am becoming increasingly hesitant to give advice to other teachers about what I do.
Lindsay Persohn:I get it. Yeah I really do understand that
John Eric Vona:I'm like I'm getting I'm getting away with what I get away with and I don't want to get somebody else in trouble.
Lindsay Persohn:But I think there is also a lot to take from your message about how we can support students with their own goals, the challenges they see in the world, you know, all of those wonderful things about authentic and exciting learning in school spaces. Exciting you know like it can be it can be that way you have to find the space yeah and
John Eric Vona:Yeah let the kids get excited and let them take the risks let them pursue what they're interested in it's it's it's kind of a a simple message but to quote the Arthur theme song it comes from the heart there you go
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah there we go uh we'll we'll end on a real positive note there with good old Arthur
John Eric Vona:Good old Arthur
Lindsay Persohn:Another literary reference
John Eric Vona:Oh wow yeah we've we've really run the gamut here today
Lindsay Persohn:Yes we have yes we have yes we have well Eric thanks so much for taking some time to talk with me today and I really enjoyed hearing about the work you do in your classroom.
John Eric Vona:Absolutely thanks for having me Lindsay that was awesome.
Lindsay Persohn:Thank you
Lindsay Persohn: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 at USF dot edu That's AMPANOS@ USF dot edu.