Classroom Caffeine
Classroom Caffeine
A Stories-To-Live-By Conversation with Anna Hamilton from The Marjorie
Anna Hamilton talks to us about the work of The Marjorie, Florida’s independent reporting outlet dedicated to the critical intersection of social justice and the environment. Anna is the Co-Founder & Development Director for The Marjorie. She is a radio producer and oral historian whose work explores the cultures and environments of the American South. Anna has developed projects for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Southern Foodways Alliance, and reported for outlets including NPR and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. The Marjorie is not your source for breaking news. Instead, they specialize in telling in-depth stories about Florida’s environment that consider human values as well as important historical and cultural contexts. The Marjorie was named for three of Florida’s iconic Marjories: author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, conservationist Marjorie Harris Carr, and advocate Marjory Stoneman Douglas. The Marjorie has collaborated with members of the Stories-To-Live-By project through panel presentations and resource sharing. You can connect with Anna and The Marjorie at themarjorie.org.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Egmont Key: A Seminole Story (https://stofthpo.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Egmont-Key-Digital-book-web.pdf)
To cite this episode:
Persohn, L. (Host). (2026, Feb 12). A Stories-To-Live-By Conversation with Anna Hamilton from The Marjorie. (Season 6, No. 7) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/AB4B-EC88-D5E0-A7FF-E805-G
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, Anna Hamilton talks to us about the work of The Marjorie, Florida's independent reporting outlet dedicated to the critical intersection of social justice and the environment. Anna is the co-founder and development director for The Margorie. She's a radio producer and oral historian whose work explores the cultures and environments of the American South. Anna has developed projects for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Southern Foodways Alliance, and reported for outlets including NPR and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. The Margorie is not your source for breaking news. Instead, they specialize in telling in-depth stories about Florida's environment that consider human values as well as important historical and cultural contexts. The Marjorie was named for three of Florida's iconic Marjories: author Marjorie Kennan Rawlings, conservationist Marjorie Harris Carr, and advocate Marjorie Stoneman Douglas. The Marjorie has collaborated with members of the Stories to Live By Project through panel presentations and resource sharing. You can connect with Anna and the Marjorie at themargeorie.org. That's T-H-E-M-A-R-J-O-R-I-E.org. 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. Anna, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me, Lindsay. I'm delighted. So from your own experiences, would you share with us one or two moments that inform your thinking about climate literacies or climate education?
Anna Hamilton:Absolutely. I have a lot to say about this. And I think it's helpful to start from my perspective as a journalist and an editor, kind of from a bird's eye view, and thinking about the myths that we know about climate change, that climate change is something that will happen in the future to someone else, somewhere else. And we know very well at this point that that's not true. We're all experiencing in very real time the impacts of climate change on different scales, different levels. So that's kind of the positioning that I approach from my work at the Margorie. When we think about our roles as journalists and editors, we know because of our experience on the ground in communities, and our reporters are very much members of their own communities, that some of the most effective climate conversations and climate education is happening in a lot of different spaces on the ground, in conversation, through reporting and through conversations that we all have on a day-to-day basis. So, with that in mind, we especially at the Marjorie like to think about our job being to meet people where they are. So thinking about science and data on one hand as sort of a top-down approach, but what's the bottom-up approach that we can use to better understand what exactly is happening? We might not all agree about the causal factors. Climate change has for a long time now been a very politicized and contested idea, to say the least. So our job is to really meet people where they are, to learn from them while suspending kind of our own judgment about what they're experiencing and how they're experiencing it. Oftentimes we learn more by doing that and we hear things that we didn't expect. We engender trust that way too. So those are a little bit kind of abstract ideas that kind of guide us in our work. The other thing that I'll say is the Marg iorie a slow journalism outlet. We're not a breaking news organization. Our stories are often reported out for months and even years in some cases. And one of the things that allows us to do is to kind of flex our creative and imaginative muscles, which is a real joy and it's a real luxury that a lot of journalism outlets don't necessarily have. One of the series that I'll mention that we have is a contributor series called Dispatches from a Sinking State. And that is a series of first-person essays written by emerging writers, you know, brand new folks who've never written for outlets before, as well as experienced folks. So it's a nice blend. And the goal with that series is to provide a space for people to write about the changes that they're witnessing in their corner of the state. And so, in thinking about climate literacies and climate education, I really love that we can provide that space for people to think through, to kind of like do that personal work to emplace themselves in the climate crisis, which can feel very big and impersonal and scary and like catastrophic, and to juggle the nuance and complexity of living in this time, you know, trying to juggle optimism with pessimism. And so thinking about providing and grounding folks in their stories within this broader time scale and the broader histories here kind of reminds us of our agency and some of the solutions thinking that's really important. So I think I'm talking around your question a lot, but those are some of the things that I think I'd mention first off.
Lindsay Persohn:I took note of many things you said, Anna, but I love that the name of that series. Of course, I hate the idea behind it, but Dispatch from a Sinking State, I mean, it really does, it brings up some real visceral reactions to what's happening in the state of Florida. And I feel like I've actually witnessed some of this myself. I drive a good distance when I drive to my home campus. And after last hurricane season, there are areas of what we would often around here called old Florida country, you know, that was usually reserved for cattle. And you, you know, you might see deer and hogs and that sort of thing out there. But I'm seeing like cow fences that previously were high and dry, and now there's water surrounding them, or in some instances, water that is pretty high up on those fences. But I think due to development in some of those areas as well as other factors, that landscape is changing. And it is a little bit alarming to drive through those areas and to think, wow, this used to be a dry and productive space for cattle to graze. And now it's a pond or larger. Sometimes it looks more like a lake. And to be able to collect stories from folks around the state of those sorts of things that they experience related to changes in the climate, I look forward to reading those. What a wonderful way for people to share what they're seeing and even to begin processing some of that. Like I think there's grief that comes along with that. There's sadness, and also it can be really scary, especially if you're in one of those areas where you feel like whether it's development is encroaching or you're in an area that was maybe low to begin with, and suddenly you're finding yourself dealing with flooding situations that maybe you thought, ah, like you said, like we started, that'll happen to someone else somewhere else. And then suddenly it's at your front door. Those things I think are, yeah, it's a lot to process, especially with the rest of the world coming at us so fast and furious, and the expectation that you just keep moving through your day-to-day life. I was actually having a conversation like this with a couple colleagues this morning about, you know, there's so much going on in the world, and yet we're still, you know, checking stuff off our to-do list and trying to be as productive as we can, which doesn't always feel very good.
Anna Hamilton:I think that's exactly right. Yes, the danger of a series like this is that it's kind of permeated with an inherent sense of loss and urgency, like you're mentioning. And it can feel very like dystopian when, as you mentioned, like, yep, we're working our day jobs and we need to make sure we're out the door at the same time. And did I feed my dog? And like, are the kids okay? No, everything that we have to take care of. So it's a lot to juggle. And since we've been doing dispatches, I've kind of started to feel like it's a community-building mechanism because one of the hard things about the climate crisis is that it is very isolating and it demands that we all participate in it, whether we defer that participation or not. And I think one of the important pieces of that is while we work through kind of that meaning-making process on our own, it's also really important to remember that there are other people carrying these huge feelings and sometimes these like complicated feelings. Because I absolutely like the feeling of losing our wild lands or our agriculture lands feels very familiar to me and resonates very strongly with who I am as a Floridian. And also like development brings like more convenience or maybe more diversity, or maybe more opportunities for jobs or healthcare or whatever it is. So I think in participating in community, and anytime we can carve out opportunities to share those feelings and to try to extend that meaning making to other people, then like that's where the magic happens, and that's where like that creative solutions thinking uh and like shared responsibility comes into play.
Lindsay Persohn:We're living in an era when creative solutions and shared responsibility may actually begin to get us somewhere in these conversations, right? Because as you mentioned, there is so much push and pull. And I think anytime someone who is very concerned about the climate crisis, you know, anytime those groups or individuals make some progress, it feels like, you know, we we backslide again. We're right now sitting in the midst of a very cold, cold front that is intended to last several days. And this is in Florida, and of course, there are other places in the US where there's significant ice storms. And unfortunately, we have a federal administration that says, so where's that global warming, right? Which I think just really serves to push back against any progress that may have been made, particularly with folks who may not believe that this is a real thing or that it will happen to them or that it will impact where they live. So I think that's that's really hard. As we were saying, they're very challenging times that we are living in and living through. And I think when we can find community, we can find support and creative collective kinds of solutions, that's a good day.
Anna Hamilton:That is a good day. I mean, I you know, it's funny when we started the Marjorie in 2017, we started it because we were starting to witness the decline of like local news outlets and the rising instances of news deserts, as well as, as I mentioned, the politicization of like climate change. Like Governor Scott wasn't allowing state workers to use that term. And none of those things have got like those trends have only intensified. And to add on top of that, in the past three years, I mean, well, since COVID, we have more people moving to Florida at a faster rate. There are more people in new environments without that kind of anchored multi-generational knowledge that there's a lot that feels less predictable. And so I don't really, I guess I don't have anything important to add there except that it just feels like we're in a big like, let's wait and see what happens moment. And that feeling is extending across the country.
Lindsay Persohn:And there's really no news of organized responses to these natural disasters. And you know, as hard as that stuff has always been and as chaotic as response can be, yeah, I think there are just so many questions now about what kind of supports exist during and certainly after climate-driven weather events. So yeah, like you said, we're all in, we're all in kind of a to use a good old Florida term, we're all hunkering down, aren't we? And and trying to understand what might happen next and how we can affect, you know, our local communities and and also communities that are on a global level. So it's a lot. It's a lot to take in and a lot to think about. I think you've already started to answer this second question, but I'll go ahead and ask it directly. What do you want listeners to know about your work related to climate literacies?
Anna Hamilton:So for us at the Margorie, I will say that I think climate literacy hinges on kind of a like braided interrelation of science and lived experience. So in the Marjorie, o ur focus is really on the deep human story of the issues that we report on. And so we take very seriously the mandate to bring science and data, you know, some of the things that we're used to measuring climate change and environmental change with in communication with lived experience and long history. So, what I would want listeners to know is that our stories are very deep stories in terms of both the scientific data as well as like the culture and tradition and history that live alongside that data. I would point to one example that's one of my favorite series that we've reported on called Island Impermanent, that tells the story of Egmont Key off of in Tampa Bay. Egmont Key is a barrier island that is experiencing very serious and very quick loss of land from dredging in the bay, from storms, from sea level rise. Egmont Key is a real jewel. It's a national wildlife refuge, it's a state park. There are a number of endemic and migrating species that rely on it. It's a beautiful place, like you can get there by boat. And it's also the story of the Seminole Tribe of Florida's Trail of Tears. And so there, I can talk more about that in depth, but there is a very serious and intense cultural story for that island as well. That as the island washes away, the stakes about what do we do, what do we think we should do, what are what are the long-term predictions pointing to for this island, it really brings it into a new perspective. So that's one story that I would suggest folks take a look at to really ground this idea of deep stories, of deep science and deep culture.
Lindsay Persohn:I would love it if you'd say a bit more about that. I think that in my view, part of what is so tricky about conversations about things like climate change and climate literacies is this really, dare I say, self-centered viewpoint that I think humans are encouraged to have, right? Like you said, it's it'll happen to someone else, it'll happen somewhere else. But I'm always reminded that the this world was here long before I was, and hopefully it will continue to exist long after I'm gone. And so, you know, the question becomes was it ever really ours anyway? And when I shift my thinking in that sort of way, I'm reminded of things like the fact that Florida was at one point underwater. And I think we're really naive to think that this earth doesn't work in cycles, right? So we've been there before. We may not be there again, but this state will be, and this planet may be, right? And so I think, you know, for me that helps to remove, I don't know, it's odd because somehow it removes a little bit of the emotion, but I think it removes a lot of the ego and how we think about, you know, well, they're telling me not to use a water bottle. I want to use a water bottle, you know, I I like my bottled water, all of those sorts of things. And granted, in some places you need bottled water in order to get fresh drinking water. But, you know, that I think that that is the drum that many folks have been beating for a long time. And somehow I think some some people take that as a personal attack, right? Like, uh, but I but that's how I drink my water like that, you know, as a really kind of banal example of that whole situation. But whenever we take ourselves out of the equation and we think, no, this was someone else's land long before we were here. And hopefully it will be someone else's long after we're gone. I don't know. It to me it reframes the story in really important ways that, as I often say around my house, maybe it isn't about you.
Anna Hamilton:That's a great point. Yeah, I mean, I think we could be here for months talking about like the ethics of conservation and sustainability. There is a lot to say about that idea of the lastingness of wild spaces and of our home, the earth. So let me tell you a little bit more about this story, which is that I didn't know anything about Egmont Key, and I'm from Northeast Florida, and heard representatives from the Seminole Tribe of Florida in 2015, 16 or 17. Now, I can't remember, sorry, give a presentation about the work that they were doing on this island at a conference, and my jaw literally just like fell on the floor. The island was very significant for early indigenous populations, and then with the era of Indian removal and the Trail of Tears, uh Egmont Key was used as a stopover point for captured indigenous folks as they were making the trip north to Oklahoma. So there is a Seminole tribe of Florida and a Seminole tribe of Oklahoma. No surprise there about how that happened. So the Seminole tribe was working actively to understand this specific period in their tribe's history. And what they found is something that you wouldn't necessarily know if you were just recreating, visiting the island, having a beach day, taking a tour, going fishing, that in fact there was a concentration camp essentially there on the island that held members of the tribe. So they were doing work archaeologically and doing uh deep archival work to figure out like what happened and uh why wasn't this better known among present day members of the tribe. Or if it was, people might not be necessarily talking about it. To your point about does this place belong to me? Again, I'm not a member of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, very much a Northeast Floridian. This is not my story to tell. So when we approached the tribe, we approached it as a collaboration. This is not a story that we were going to tell without this working in service of their broader efforts. Or if we didn't feel like a good fit for them, that was really important for us. We weren't going to move forward. So when I mentioned that the Marjorie sometimes does, you know, months or years long reporting projects, this was one of those. I think we we definitely spent at least a year working with representatives from the tribe and going out to the to Egmont Key. So there's kind of there's like a lot of little like stars in this constellation of what is happening on this island and what does it all mean for us as contemporary readers and as contemporary Floridians. It also turns out that there was a member of the Seminole Tribe of Florida who was on the ship, stopped over at Egmont Key and a little further north staged an escape, and her name was Polly Parker, and escaped back to South Florida, where the tribe lives now. And she is credited as one of the reasons that the tribe exists in the form that it does today. She is a hugely important figure. So on one hand, we have this like very, like very tragic, awful period of human of our history as a nation, and then this exemplary story of someone who survived against all odds. And that's a story that they're still working on piecing together today. They actually have an incredible publication that they put together called Egmont Key A Seminole Story. It's a digital publication. This is also maybe a side note. I believe they were making sure it fit curriculum requirements in case folks wanted to use it in the K through 12 system here in the state. Again, I should we should double-check that. But they worked on like a very extensive public outreach package. So that's one aspect of our reporting. The other aspects is that Egmont Key made the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation's 11 to save list, which documents endangered historic sites. And Egmont Key was placed on that list the year that it came out as the first site to be listed due to the effects of climate change. So the Seminole are working to document their story at the same time that this island is washing away at a very quick pace. And in fact, when we finally published the story, it was right before one of the major, it was literally like the week before one of the major storms came through Tampa Bay. And we were like, I'm not really sure what's gonna do we like wait to publish this? Does this change everything? In any case, there it's it's been a hectic hurricane, a few hurricane seasons for the Gulf, and Egmont Key has been battered pretty good. So any in any case, that's a little bit of a zoom in on a few of the conversations that inform the broader story. There's also, you know, the strategic location of Egmont Key in Tampa Bay. The Tampa Bay pilots were stationed there. It is a national wildlife refuge, and so what's happening, like there are some fervent bird watchers who are really concerned about the birds that nest there. There are folks who love the historic sites there. So there is like a an old lighthouse that's really unique. So there are a ton of different stakeholders, and in a lot of cases it feels like a race against the clock, but asks us to think about like, as you said, whose story is this, who belongs to this story, and who does this story belong to? So it's something we kind of grapple with. And like I said, I'd never heard of Egmont Key, and the more we learned about it, the more I felt like even though I'm not from this region of Florida, this feels like a very Floridian story and something that will interest everyone, no matter if you're in the panhandle, South Florida, Central Florida, et cetera.
Lindsay Persohn:That's really helpful, Anna. We will, in your show notes, we will link to that Egmont Key Seminole story. Because I imagine educators who are doing any kind of unit on Florida history might be very interested in that publication. So I I appreciate you highlighting that. And I think at the same time, I think you've also sort of shared with us what slow journalism is really all about. It sounds like it's very much an exemplar of what slow journalism might offer. Because I do think, you know, especially now, we are in this habit of, you know, news, news, news 24-7. And they're all these sort of quick little snippets that sometimes tell us, you know, the same things over and over again without any real great detail and without really understanding the human impacts of events of the world. And so I'm I'm appreciative of this resource and I look forward to reading it myself. Thank you. Awesome.
Anna Hamilton:Thank you. Yeah, I think sharing the Seminole story would be the most important.
Lindsay Persohn:Absolutely. Yeah. And like I said, we can we can link to that because I see it's available as a free PDF. So we'll link to that for teachers.
Anna Hamilton:Perfect.
Lindsay Persohn:I think when you learn about something that A, you never knew about, right? Especially if you grew up in an area where this is clearly important, not only locally, but I think nationally and potentially globally as well. And then you realize that there's all of this rich history, it is a story that you can really get invested in because there are so many elements to it. It's it's social, it's historical, it's environmental. I think it's yet again another, another key example of how Native folks have been taken advantage of over the course of our history. And I guess it also brings us back to the question of whose land is this anyway?
Anna Hamilton:I think that's right. I mean, for me, kind of like the boiled down golden nugget is this question of like who gets to decide? Who gets to decide what happens anywhere? And that's where like fairness comes into play, or injustice comes into play, like sustainability and future thinking comes into play, or short-sightedness comes into play. For the Seminole tribe, they were doing work to bring tribal members out to Egmont Key to experience it, and at several points have had to stop doing that. And even though they have the story that they're documenting, they're actually working with USF to do 3D imaging to preserve the topography in the event that the island is not there anymore. And by all accounts, and if you read this the Egmont Key Seminole story, you'll hear from tribal members who experienced it for the first time, who really sat with what their ancestors went through there, and with the knowledge that there really is no replacement for experiencing the island physically in person. That being said, the official stance for the tribe is that Mother Nature is washing it away. There is a reason for that, and so that's what we think should happen. And that kind of sits alongside the other stakeholder opinions of what should happen to Egmont Key. So it's not like a clean story and it's not an easy story, but I do think that Floridians who are paying attention to environmental change have had the experience of thinking, wait a second, who gets to decide what happens to this place, this cow field next to my home that's going to become townhomes or this coastline that's marching in and we're seeing saltwater intrusion? Like who is who does get to decide what we're saving and what we're bidding farewell to?
Lindsay Persohn:It's all very complex and sometimes I think can be a little depressing, but I think there's also a lot of hope in connecting with others and thinking with others, and as we said earlier, shared responsibility and creative solutions. But yeah, none of it can be done in isolation. It's all very communal kind of work. So very interested to hear your response to this next question as someone who is working outside of education. Given the challenges of today's educational climate, what message do you want teachers to hear?
Anna Hamilton:Yeah, this is a really good question. And I was trying to think about what would be useful to share. And I won't lie, I'm feeling a little bit stumped. The thing that keeps coming to mind for me is expand your networks and think creatively about your networks. I mentioned to you before we started recording that I've been down to USF twice now to work with Dr. Panos on a speaker series that put myself and my colleague Becca Burton, another co-founder of The Marjorie, in conversation with several teachers. And we learned so much from the teachers and felt really inspired by the work that they were doing, by like the craftiness of how they were doing what they were doing. And we left with this very real feeling of if we can be resources for you, don't hesitate to call on us because like the rules of the game are changing. And it is asking us to be creative about how we're thinking about climate and climate literacy, how we're having those conversations, how we're learning from each other, who we're learning from. So making that conversation as wide as possible, at least again, speaking from our perspective, feels really useful and really powerful. I wish I had something smarter to kind of share. But I think some of the like forging some alliances that might not necessarily seem natural or aligned in some cases can be some of the most helpful steps.
Lindsay Persohn:Well, that may be more useful than you realize because you know, teachers can tend to sort of work just, you know, you put your head down and you do the work day to day. And so the idea of thinking creatively about what your resources might look like and who you might connect with in order to accomplish shared goals, I think that encouragement is really wonderful because sometimes I think you know, teaching can feel a bit isolating. It can feel like, you know, you're the only one who really is facing these particular challenges on this particular day. But to know that there are resources and caring individuals behind those resources who want to connect and want to support, I think that is a really impactful message. So thanks, Anna.
Anna Hamilton:Well, I appreciate it. And I'm also like feel like I'm a thousand years old where I'm like, and go outside. Like go be outside and go figure out what people are doing in a real physical way and talk to those people because that's how we do it.
Lindsay Persohn:Yeah, that's important too. I mean, even just stepping outside and reconnecting with nature, I think it does often remind us of our smallness when it comes to the grand scheme of things. And even though, you know, everyone has an impact, everyone's actions have ripple effects at the same time, we are one of billions. And so, you know, really feeling that and reconnecting to nature, I think, maybe can remind us that the challenges we're facing, they're probably shared with someone else in this great big world. And and maybe they're not as big as we thought they were.
Anna Hamilton:So absolutely. And our state is like such a beautiful place with so many different environments, so many different parks, so many different opportunities to like think through natural cycles and think about the critters that live here, and that just having students experience that can spark stuff that we can't tell them through like a lecture or written assignments.
Lindsay Persohn:Right. Yeah, there's really no replacement for that experience.
Anna Hamilton:It's true.
Lindsay Persohn:Well, Anna, I've really enjoyed talking with you today, and I thank you so much for spending some time with me and sharing the great work of the Marjorie.
Anna Hamilton:Thank you, Lindsay. Anytime. It's my pleasure.
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 Penis, Associate Professor of Literacy Studies at the University of South Florida at ampanos@usf.edu.