Classroom Caffeine
Classroom Caffeine
A Stories-To-Live-By Conversation with "Morgan"
What happens when a teacher loses her classroom library to censorship—and her students are living through floods, hurricanes, and displacement? "Morgan" invites us into a practice built on place, care, and student stories. Instead of giving up on relevance, she transforms lived experience into the curriculum: teens write about storm damage, read FEMA applications as functional texts, and use multimodal storytelling to process eco-grief and advocate for resources. Morgan traces her journey from a novice teacher with a Florida-centered library to an agile practitioner who makes space for small, daily moves that matter—morning check-ins after a flood, quickwrites that convert chaos into language, and targeted vocabulary that helps students name what they’re facing. The result: literacies that feel real, teach critical reading and argument, and restore a sense of agency.
There’s hard truth here too: teaching under today’s mandates is often intentionally unsustainable. Morgan also talks about how and where she found community— a “watering hole” beyond the building where educators troubleshoot policy shifts, share materials, and remind each other they’re not alone. Whether you’re navigating book bans, building place-based units, or looking for practical strategies that fit into five minutes, this conversation offers tools and hope for teaching literacy in a climate-changed world.
To cite this episode:
Persohn, L. (Host). (2026, Jan 13). Stories-To-Live-By with “Morgan.” (Season 6, No. 6) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/6F5A-D715-A0AE-FE0D-25F1-Y
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. In this episode, Morgan talks to us about how she supports students living through the impacts of the climate crisis. Morgan is an English language arts and intensive reading teacher at a rural Title I high school on the Gulf Coast. She was born and raised in Florida and has had the privilege of teaching in Florida for five years. Morgan came to the Stories to Live By Collective after attending an eco-justice writing retreat that was hosted by the Tampa Bay Area Writing Project in 2022. That initiative eventually became the Stories to Live By Project, and she has been along for the ride ever since. She was still a novice teacher when she attended the original Eco-Justice Writing Retreat, and the Stories to Live By collective has become a pivotal point of support for her as she has grown into her teaching practice. 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. Morgan, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show.
Morgan:Thank you 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?
Morgan:So the longer that I've been in the classroom, the more I've come to realize that the literacy crisis that we're dealing with in our classrooms is super intertwined with the climate crisis that we're facing in our community here in Florida. So many of our kids have been denied the resources that they need to become strong analytical readers, just as our communities are being denied the resources that we need to thrive and survive, whether that's clean water, the protection of our floodplains, you know, coastal erosion. And this really all started for me when I lost my classroom library a few years ago. When I first started teaching, it was really important for me to curate a library of books and stories that my kids could not only relate to, but already have prior knowledge of. Because I teach intensive reading and I teach intensive reading in high school, my primary focus is improving reading comprehension rather than like phonics. So that means I'm always working on building language skills and fluency and metacognitive skills. And to do that, if my kids are already coming to those books with prior knowledge, it's so much easier. So for me, I use place-based education as kind of a shortcut. I was, you know, a fairly new intensive reading teacher. And I wanted to build a library with books and stories that my kids could relate to that looked like their lives that was about things they already loved. And I had a nice little library going with like Hoot by Carl Hyessen, Strawberry Girl, books that the kids really enjoyed. And then there were some changes at both the state level and the district level. And we were told no classroom libraries. So all the books that I had curated with my kids in mind had to disappear. So at this point, I have some books back in there, but it's a very small collection of books that have been, you know, chosen from a list that someone who doesn't know my kids has put together. And most of them have nothing to do with Florida or anything that interests the kids. And that was really hard for me. But spending all this time to put together a library with my kids specifically in mind, and then having to make it go away overnight. But yeah, with all this like censorship and all the hostility that, you know, has been increasing the longer I've been in the classroom, it's kind of forced me to step back and think about how I do provide my kids access because it's still incredibly important to me. It's still the number one priority that like when the kids are in my classroom, they're getting the best education that they can. And so that means I really had to take time and rethink things. And it made me start to think about my students and their stories and the idea that like my students' stories could be the text that we engaged with in the classroom. So then it's all about like, okay, my students are readers and they're writers, and it's their own stories that they're bringing in. And I need to, as the teacher, then support them. And the stories that they're bringing in, so many of them are stories of like eco-injustice and climate crisis. Because again, we're in Florida. We're dealing with flooding, we're dealing with hurricanes, we're dealing with red tide. And so as the teacher, then I have this responsibility to find ways to support them in telling their stories, whether that's with the, you know, climate vocabulary or talking about like eco-grief and other things. So my goal is that they feel safe and supported in my classroom.
Lindsay Persohn:So, Morgan, I don't know if you know this about me, but I'm a former school librarian. And so your story is very near and dear to me. And I have to say, I think what you're doing is genius. If you have students you are encouraging to write and read anyway, why not read the stories that they are writing? And I hope that over time you're building a collection of stories that have been authored by your students to rebuild your classroom library. But it's in a restrictive education environment, it's just it's such a genius solution because as you were talking about the library that you'd built that you were told not to use any longer. I could see all of that. I mean, I've worked with young people, I've worked more with middle schoolers than high schoolers, but their stories, the things that are on their mind, they are about the injustices in the world, including things related to the environment. You know, they're concerned about rising tides, they're concerned about intensifying storms, because, as you said, they have been personally impacted by these things. So, really a smart way to build a collection of meaningful stories and to create that engagement that we always hope to have with a classroom library particularly whenever you're given materials that don't really meet that requirement.
Morgan:So that's that's the whole like I had to kind of step back and be like, how do I teach my kids to read if I don't have books?
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, no, it's it's it's genius. It's absolutely genius. So you've shared a little bit about this already, but what do you want listeners to know about your work related to climate literacies?
Morgan:For one thing, I think a lot of times we limit ourselves as teachers without realizing it. I think a lot of times we think about, oh, climate literacy, we're gonna have to integrate like a major inquiry project that's gonna take multiple weeks, or we're gonna focus on rhetoric or scientific writing. And all that stuff is super important, and all that stuff should be in the classroom and in the curriculum. But sometimes I think integrating climate literacy into your classroom is as simple as asking my kids to write me a note for their do now about how they're doing after last week's flood. And I think that's a set of skills that's absolutely crucial when you're in the crisis, when your house is flooded and on fire and a tree fell in through the roof with a hurricane. We also need to be working on s ocial emotional learning and resiliency and telling stories of survival and of hope. And that doesn't always look like a whole unit plan. Sometimes that is the check-ins, sometimes that is diverting a little bit and focusing on the kids and their most pressing needs. So academics, when they talk about climate literacy, they have different frameworks. And there's one in particular, the click framework, that I try to go back to a lot as a teacher. And it's this idea that there's different types of care. And so there's kinship care, which would be like we need to take care of the plants and the animals. You know, they're living just like us. There's earth care, we need to take care of the air that we breathe, the water we drink. There's systems care. That would be stuff like we need to, you know, make sure our education system is doing good. And then there's people care, which is taking care of other people. And I think for me, when I go into my classroom, I am trying to model that care for my students and be that people care and focus on, okay, we gotta, you know, teach the survival skills, the rhetoric, you know, the argumentative writing, all that really important stuff. But we also need to make sure that we're telling stories of hope. We're helping them tell their stories of hope and survival. And that goes into both there. And so again, that could be really small. That could be, hey, here's a do now, tell me how you're doing. And sometimes that's more like sitting down with a kid and helping them fill out the FEMA application for the family. As well as like, okay, we're gonna do this big project, you're gonna ask all these questions, do all this research, and create this beautiful multimodal presentation. It's all of those things. It's not just like a one unit plan.
Lindsay Persohn:You've given me so much to think about already. And what you're saying, it just makes so much sense. I I would agree. I think sometimes as teachers, I think I think it's easy to get bogged down in sometimes it's what you feel like you're being told to do. Or, you know, you think about shadow policies and how policies are translated from, you know, let's say a federal document and or a state document to a district level, to a s chool level, to a classroom level. And sometimes I think we forget that there may be more space in that interpretation than we think, right? And so I think re-revisiting that and reconsidering where is there space? What can I do? I think it's very easy to get hung up on what we can't do in classrooms. And so I love your can do attitude and thinking, okay, well, I've been told I can't do this. What next? How do I still offer my students what I know they need while also following the mandate as it's been translated for me? It's just brilliant. It's it's so smart.
Morgan:Well, thank you. I think I think that's what you have to do though, as a teacher in this particular environment is it's always this pivoting with like, okay, my kids still need access. How do I get them access? How can I, how can I change things? How can I adapt?
Lindsay Persohn:Right, right. Yeah. This is absolutely the foundation of great teaching, right? It's meeting kids where they are. The idea of using a FEMA application as a a reading and writing task. I mean, it's so real-world applicable, it's so important, and it's not easy. You know, I think I think we think that forms, well, you just fill in the blanks, but you know, when you don't really know what they're what they're asking for or the form is arduous, you need those skills. Yeah. Yeah. What else would you like listeners to know about your work?
Morgan:I think there's a lot. A lot of times I'm telling people, these are all the things that I've done, and they're all like, oh, this is so amazing. And it doesn't feel like that when I'm doing it. It usually feels like I'm drowning and I'm like, nothing is working, and the kids are struggling. And I would say the big thing is I don't see the impact of a lot of the things I do until later when they come back and visit me later. And yeah, that that's a big thing for me, is most of the time I feel like I'm beating my head against a brick wall and just being like, because, like, for example, a community I teach in was really devastated by Hurricane Milton and we lost weeks of school. Even after we came back, students were out, most of them, some of them for a number of months, just because like the roads were flooded, you know, they were displaced, they had to live move somewhere else because their house flooded. And like, especially in that moment, I'm just trying to show up and show up for the kids and get through the like mandated curriculum, but also keep them from not losing it. And it doesn't feel like I'm doing any sort of like big, you know, here's this big beautiful project on climate literacy that I can go present at a conference or anything. It's just that showing up every day and trying to navigate that. And ultimately it goes back to that idea of care though. And I think, again, like I live in a community that's in this crisis. And I I think at a certain point we're all living in communities that are in this crisis, whether we've recognized that or not. And that act of care, that act of people care is doing the work. So yeah.
Lindsay Persohn:I think there are often times in teaching where you may not see the immediate impact of what you've done. I think that is so true. I think it could be even more true in communities who are experiencing crisis, right? Because there are in at these times, there are so many top priorities. Right. It's filling out the form, but it's also, of course, making sure that you're fed and clean for the day. You know, it's recouping some sort of shelter, you know, whenever yours has been destroyed or made unviable somehow. And I think that that's kind of it's like the crisis moment interpretation of what teaching generally feels like. You know, we talk about seeing kids learn and how magical that is to watch a realization, you know, when you see it on their face, they've put these things together. But you've made me wonder if that learning cycle looks different in times of crisis. Because again, I think the priorities are different in our lives whenever you're just trying to get by day to day. And I don't, I don't know that it's necessarily just with climate crisis. I think in any kind of poverty crisis, you know, anything like that, you know, I think often we as teachers collectively sort of lean into this. Well, why aren't they getting it? Or why why don't they care about this? And I think you just have to reset and go, oh, it might be because there are more pressing things in their lives. But we do often hear from students on down the road, whether it's months later or even years later, they come back to say, You did this thing and it made a difference for me.
Morgan:Yes.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah. But we don't always know how that plays out in the moment. So.
Morgan:We do not.
Lindsay Persohn:No. I think what you said is just so important. The the idea that, like, yes, you talk about these things and I think you're doing amazing work. It's obvious you're doing amazing work, but to not feel like that in the moment, it is hard. It is hard to keep showing up when you don't feel the impact of what you're, you know, of of all of that energy and effort that goes into showing up every day.
Morgan:Yes. And I I think the kids, it it's the same thing too, because they're showing up and they're dealing with goodness knows what. And then we're like, hey, read this poem that you don't relate with, right? Do all this stuff. And they're like, what's the point?
Lindsay Persohn:Right.
Morgan:Why am I doing this? And yeah, so it's finding ways to then help them see that, like, no, reading is gonna help you. Reading is part of like, I am trying to help you later on. That's always the challenge, though.
Lindsay Persohn:I've figured out those long-term outcomes, and how do you, yeah, how do you break it down so that the the small stuff in the interim makes sense for longer-term goals? Yeah. Morgan, I think you just maybe made me a little bit better teacher. So thank you. And relatedly, given the challenges of today's educational climate, what message do you want other teachers to hear?
Morgan:Oof. Teaching in 2025 is not sustainable, and that is intentional. And I think that means we need to be intentional in finding ways to make it easier and finding ways to help ourselves. And for me, that was finding a community that would support me. I think we all need that to get through with teaching in this environment. I I think we all need that community. We need to find people who will take care of us, just like I'm trying to go into my classroom and take care of my kids. I need people outside my classroom that are gonna take care of me. And I think that's so important because the teachers I know will cut themselves up into little pieces to take care of their kids. And we need we need to prioritize ourselves as well. And for me, I like I know it's not easy to find a community that's gonna support you. I've been super privileged that I have found a community outside my school at USF and I have found people that show up for me and have helped me navigate when I, you know, when some new edict comes down, I can go to my group and be like, what do I do now? And they they listen, and sometimes that's all I need, but sometimes they also give me ideas and help me think through things. So for me, I'm a big believer in finding a community of educators, even if they're not, you know, doing your specific job outside your school. And like trying to find, like, for lack of a better word, a watering hole that you can go to outside your school to navigate all this stuff that has been invaluable. Even just like being able to talk to someone and be like, Am I insane? Is this insane? And getting that validation. This is this is okay for me to cry, right? They took my classroom library away. I can cry, right?
Lindsay Persohn:Yes. You should mourn that. Absolutely. Yeah.
Morgan:And I I think that's so important. I think that's part of like we need people to take care of us so we can take care of the kids. And people show up for me, and that's why I can show up for my kids. So I think there's a lot of power in community.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah. And I I think this just reminds me of what you were you were talking about earlier with flexible thinking, right? If you if your community is not at your school, and and sometimes I think you know, we we rely on different types of communities for different types of things. And so even if you have great friends and you have great colleagues at your school, right, but they may not be thinking about the same things that you're thinking about. And so seeking out where are like-minded individuals who have some of the same thoughts who I can say, am I losing it? I mean, is this really is this am I interpreting this correctly? Am I thinking about all the things I can do, all of the ways to better understand or to to even sometimes work around this thing that's in my way? You know, it's it's critical. It's critical for us to have communities. I think that's in any walk of life, right? Whether it's your profession, your personal life, people make all the difference for us.
Morgan:They do. They really do.
Lindsay Persohn:Well, Morgan, I thank you so much for talking with me today and for sharing your ideas. I think you have a really beautiful way of looking at your work and looking at the world. And I'm grateful to you for sharing it.
Morgan:Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
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.edu. That's ampanos@usf.edu.