Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:
This episode is part of our curriculum series, and we’re looking at how to think creatively about the books that bring you joy to excite students and offer impactful teaching opportunities. Literature has the power to engage students in meaningful discussions, linking literature to real-world issues and promoting effective activism and resilience. We are looking specifically at the novel “Somewhere Beyond the Sea” by TJ Klune to draw out some ideas to connect with activism and civics education, offering practical examples of what your ELA or other curricula may look like. Why? The big dream is to transform classrooms into vibrant hubs of creativity and civic engagement by leveraging the power of literature. And, it doesn’t have to be non-fiction or academic literature—joyful, fun reading also has the power to positively impact educational settings. For example, TJ Klune dedicates “Somewhere Beyond the Sea” to the trans community around the world in the book’s foreword, writing, “For the trans community the world over: I see you, I hear you, I love you. This story is for you.” Given the current political environment and attacks on trans people, this book becomes a timely and important way to lean into what’s happening in the world through current events. Educators can connect literature with real-world issues, fostering a deeper understanding of activism and shared identity spaces. What? Using “Somewhere Beyond the Sea” as an example, here are some ways to use literature to connect with important real-world issues in your classroom. Step 1: Pull out themes in books that make sense in the personal and cultural context your students are in. In "Somewhere Beyond the Sea," there are important themes around found family, voice and human stories, allyship, and queer representation. Step 2: Develop curriculum components around the themes in your book to explore relevant issues. You can utilize literature circles, writer's notebooks, and student journals to facilitate discussions that connect literature to real-world issues. You may also choose to center your curriculum around current event connections, like using Pride Month to explore LGBTQ+ or queer studies, history, and current events. Step 3: Design projects that allow students to apply their learning in creative ways, such as writing their own fantasy or literary pieces inspired by radical imagining and activism. There are lots of options here—you could have a current event day for the book, host a gallery walk, or have a Socratic seminar. Step 4: Use guiding questions to participate in radical imagining. Some examples include:
As you work to integrate creative literature and civic engagement, educators should be open to exploring the intersection of literature, current events, and personal stories, encouraging students to see themselves as active participants in shaping their communities. To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Curriculum Playlist with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 224 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
TRANSCRIPT
00:01 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Hello and welcome to an episode of the Time for Teachership podcast. This is episode 224. And today we're in the midst of a curriculum series and I want to encourage people to think creatively about what books kind of have brought you joy or what books out there are exciting or interesting to your kids, that connect to current events, that are kind of a blend of all of those things. And so some of the time I'm kind of giving ideas for how you might bring all of those things together or, step-by-step, how you might go ahead and do those things. And sometimes I think, as we do as educators, we want to model what the possibilities could be. And so today's episode is kind of a modeling of what was happening in my brain as I was engaging in some fun reading for myself. It's a good thing to engage in fun reading when we're always learning and growing professionally Fun to just get out of that and sometimes do things for fun. So I was reading book two in the House on the Cerulean Sea series, so this is called Somewhere Beyond the Sea. I really enjoyed the first one. I listened to the audiobook version as I was marathon training a year and a half ago or so, and really really liked it. Particularly the narration of the audiobook I thought was excellent and I just think TJ Klune's writing in this series, particularly this, was all that I had read at this particular moment in time. And then, since I've read some other of his stuff, it's just it's so well done and it really really just hooked me in the forward, and so let's just kind of dive in. I'm going to read the forward to you. I'll give you the gist without spoilers, and then I'm going to talk about what is happening in my brain as I'm thinking about constructing a unit around this, like where my brain goes. And then I also want to help us think whether you are a teacher or an instructional leader who might be supporting teachers to design curriculum and bring out the joy and the kind of creative activism and possibilities that are present. And like how do we tie? Tie, for example, I I think this is kind of the crux of this episode for me is like how we tie kind of a radical imagining as a phrase I learned from adrian marie brown, and the kind of activism or civics component of all the things that I love and I think many of us love to do we talk a lot about on the podcast, with something like an ELA course, right, like a curriculum, where you should have a book and you have to do these reading comprehension things and you have to do all these reading and writing skills, right. Like how do we kind of merge all of that together? I often talk a lot about social studies and I think civics is just naturally a component of social studies, but it's so possible to do this well in ELA that I wanted to kind of think that through just as another example. So here we go, somewhere beyond the sea. 02:51 Here is the foreword by the author, tj Klune, for the trans community the world over I see you, I hear you, I love you. This story is for you. And the book continues on to be be, as some reviews have called it, very heavy-handed in its connections to. I mean, I'm recording this in 2025, amidst a second trump presidency, where attacks on trans people legislatively, in social society, on social media, right in conversation amongst politicians, is just tragic and harmful and scary and frustrating and anger inducing and all the things. And so I think the original kind of new teacher in me or not even new teacher, but just like when I was a teacher, the way I would design curriculum would be around. Okay, here's this terrible thing that's happening in the world and current events and politics. We're going to kind of learn about it, we're going to get frustrated by it, and then we're going to maybe do an activism project, like in a future unit, or we might talk about you know how it makes us feel, and then we kind of like leave it. And I've just been learning a lot as a human, but also from these professional learning books and things that it's really important to do something with that. 04:12 Research shows this. But also I was just reading a book by Chad Dumas, who I will be interviewing on the podcast, I think at the time this will air you can go back and it will be a July episode, so it'll have already aired. But in it he quotes Paulo Freire, who actually I'm paraphrasing here because I don't have the text in front of me, but something like people who just, you know, have dialogue, like they leave frustrated if there's just dialogue and there's not action as a consequence of the dialogue. And so I want to keep connecting back to that civics idea of like, yes, we're dialoguing and dialogue is great, and I'm talking a lot about student led discussion this year particularly, but really apologies for all the dog noises. I have a puppy and sometimes we hear a lot of collar shaking, so collar is off. Now let's see how this goes. We can right Fuse all of these things. We can do this. Well, here we go. Let's dive in. Totally forgot where I was. 05:11 Here's the gist of this book. The series is about magical kids who live on a remote island. They are awesome and the audiobook version really gives them excellent voices. It's incredible. I highly recommend once more the audiobook version. And the larger community has really fear mongered and oppressed magical beings in this series, this book and the adults that run the orphanage. I don't want to spoiler anything from the previous book either, so I'll just say his treatment as a child and his public statements about himself, his kids and magical beings in general are all kind of part of this particular book, more so even than in the first book, although the first book touches on these things. The first book touches on these things, so I do think that you could teach this as a standalone. It's also nice as a series. 06:01 I think you could get a lot of the elements from the first book without the second book. However, I will say, as I indicated the review's language talks about earlier, there's a very heavy-handed connection to current events and people who are different, particularly queer folks. But I think honestly, like the connections are quite broad and applicable. I mean magical creatures being kind of the focus of this book, I think, would say right, this is not something that we have in our world. However, can be parallel to many things happening. So themes of the book that you could explore in this text and connect through discussion, connect, if you were doing this as kind of literature circles, and this is one of the options and connecting to other books, you know, however, you want to bring themes in. One is found family and so connecting experience for kids who have moved to maybe a new family or they have moved to a new school, right, so kids who maybe have been in foster care, military families who move a lot, just people who have, you know, their parents have changed jobs and they need to, or their caretakers have changed jobs, I should say, and they need to attend a new school now. So found family and kind of those are options for connections to the human piece of who students are and how they're showing up in the class and what they might be able to bring in as personal experience. If you're doing, for example, a circle share to connect to the book. 07:19 Radical imagining again a term I referenced, I learned from Adrienne Marie Brown and here's how she kind of talks about it and she cites I apologize for the pronunciation of these names, but Kasnavish and Haven 2014, who define it as ability to imagine the world, life and social institutions not as they are, but as they might otherwise be. It brings possible futures back to work on the present, to inspire action. So this idea of radical imagining happens in this fantasy book. It happens in any fantasy book really, but really well done here. And then, you know, connecting that to current events, there's a beautiful opportunity through dialogue and through project-based learning. 08:04 Here, I think, also themes of the book power of voice and allyship. So there's a very human focus of this book. Very, very much humanity is central and you know they recognize the importance of stories. They recognize that the main character talks to the media, talks to people, brings people's humanity out in understanding his story and connecting with the pain and the radical imagining of this person. Right, and I think that that humanity that is central is really important for us as humans to recognize, and students as they're learning to have civic dialogue and kind of speak in different ways than they see in popular news coverage of politicians. This is kind of a way to paint that picture and keep humanity at the center. And I say allyship very intentionally as well, because there are people who in this book are not magical and they are rallying around the magical community. Of course there are those who also are not, but there is, I think, a good attention to that aspect of the book as well that you don't need to be part of a community to kind of let them lead and support them in ways they want to be supported. Right, and so there's this true kind of allyship happening there or co-conspiratoriness happening there. 09:20 Also, themes queer representation, as I mentioned earlier, and those current event connections are really clear. So I think again, if you want to do anything really intentionally with LGBTQ plus or queer current events, like I mean to merge both of those or just like as part of you know, like Pride Month or as part of I mean to merge both of those or just like as part of you know, like Pride Month or as part of I mean, I like going beyond the months, but as part of kind of a unit on queer studies, queer history, queer texts and literature, or again as a current events connection where if you're doing this, as you know, a crossover unit with a social studies team or you are a humanities teacher, that kind of teaches both. I think there's very clear connections that you can pull up. Now how I might teach it. I've kind of touched on this a little bit so far, but I might say okay, so the unit topic like I'm teaching a unit on activism and radical imagining becomes an activist strategy option. So I'm reading this book through the lens of it being a piece of activism or a piece of civic engagement, and so I'm actually reading it for the strategy itself of like this author is radically imagining what life could look like through this kind of fantastical parallel world. So that could be an option. 10:28 I also could do a creative writing unit. If I'm an ELA teacher and I am pulling writing instruction ideas from, I would really like I've mentioned this before on podcast and we got to actually interview the authors, which was so cool their stories, their voices, and so pulling ideas from like, how do we use mentor texts to study them, to learn what they do well and then do it in our own writing. I think that would be super, super cool, both from like kind of a fantasy element, but also just from like a good writing element and how to kind of weave in current events and all the things. Now, another option for kind of thinking through how I would pace out the unit and kind of the lesson by lesson level of what I could do. So, unit arc wise, I could have a class circle on personal stories around identity, oppression and or activism or radical imagining, right. 11:14 So I could say, okay, you can bring in kind of your personal connections to the humanity of these characters. So either you've had a similar experience, you have identified with the non-magical beings and their allyship of an oppressed group. You have had this opportunity to share kind of your human story or your lived experience around an issue and we're heard, or we're not heard, and what did that feel like? You have a vision of what the world could look like other than what it currently is? Tell us about it. So I mean you could connect to characters, you could connect to the author and their arts. 11:47 I think there's a lot of things you could do here, but I always love the idea of starting with a classic circle and lived experience and creative ideas and kind of surfacing those and grounding the unit in that you could I mentioned this earlier but read the book whole class or read the book as a small group and kind of do literature circles. So again all those themes I like to do literature circles that come together around certain themes or have common, multiple common themes. I've listed those out. You could certainly run literature circles knowing without reading the book you can know kind of how this might sit among some of the other books you may choose or offer students to choose from. Know kind of how this might sit among some of the other books you may choose or offer students to choose from. You can this is a concept actually from their Stories, their Voices you could tell I absolutely loved that text. Thank you, authors. 12:31 You could read it as a reader and a writer, so you could read the text for the story itself, as you would typically read a fictional story, but you could also read it through the lens of a writer. So either we read the whole book through as a reader, experience the whole thing, and then go back and kind of pick out what we loved, or I love the idea of doing and I think this is Jeff oh, I always forget his name, anderson, I think. Mechanically Inclined is his book and he talks about kind of keeping a writer's notebook and identifying some interesting phrases or interesting things that writers do as you're reading, and then you can kind of talk about that within the literature circle, within the whole class, share out, you could do. I used to do like a Friday, Every Friday the lesson was something like a writer's notebook or kind of pulling out these interesting writing techniques that we would surface from the literature circles as we were reading. This could be part of individual student journals where they submit a journal every week in response to whatever book they're reading. So if they're reading this, they could kind of highlight what it is that the author is doing based on however much they read that week. Okay, those are all examples. 13:34 Literature circle activities. If you are doing this in a literature circle, you could prompt the student discussions by inviting connections. So I always really like this idea to just invite connections and so you might say, like connect to a personal live experience and share that with a group. You might connect to a current event story and you know that changes week to week. So students could bring up something one week and then three weeks later there's a brand new current event that they could connect to. So lots of opportunities. You could connect to another class, you could connect to a lot of different things, another book that you had read earlier in the year or last year. 14:10 You could use a protocol like ThinkTalk Open Exchange from Rhonda Bondi, where you're inviting each individual student to kind of or everyone, I guess has think time, but each individual student has a moment to think before they individually speak. They speak. All people get to do that. So you know, I have five seconds to think, 30 seconds to talk, and then the next person has five seconds to think about their idea in silence, 30 seconds to talk, right all around the circle and then we open exchange. So it's kind of an open dialogue, no kind of boundaries. 14:41 You can use another protocol like color, symbol, image, which comes from Harvard's Project Zero Thinking Routines, where you're inviting metaphorical thinking. I love this in a lot of ways, but I particularly love it when we're thinking about good writing techniques and abstract ways of thinking. And so, yes, you're reading this fiction, fantastical novel and we're abstracting ways that this actually connects to our lived experience in the real world and current events. That requires a level of abstraction that I think sometimes the color symbol, image routine or others like it can make a little bit easier. It's a nice scaffold and it is an additional scaffold for this type of thinking. I like climber cards which we can link to in the show notes and the blog post for this episode, because those are these cool kind of like deck of cards where there's images on them that you don't have to like come up with the images. But you could also Google search for some images or have students bring up images on their computers or devices, if you have that available. Okay, other things within the unit arc. 15:39 I think I would do a current event day for this particular book, and I mean you could all discuss the same one, like you could name it, or have a student name it and bring it in and everyone explores it and connects it to the book. Or students could research their own and then, either in some groups or kind of individually, turn and talk, or however you want to structure it. Students could say, hey, I've been reading this, I've found this current event, I'm bringing it in. I'm going to summarize it for my partner or the group or the class you could do a gallery walk. I mean there's a lot of different ways to share out here, but they're the ones doing that original research and they're bringing it in. So two different options there. 16:17 I think at some point I would do a Socratic seminar specifically on linking the book to current events, because it is so heavy-handed, because it's offering itself up to that and because current events are always changing. It'll be interesting, you know, if you were reading this several years from its publication date. How does the current world at that time connect to the time of publication and what was happening in the world, particularly considering the United States context of the author and that element? But I think it'd be really interesting to do a specific Socratic seminar on that. We can also link to the Socratic seminar template in the blog post that I've used with students A true collaborative effort for many of the students across many teachers, mostly in the social studies department of Manhattan International High School, as well as the different networks that we have been involved in Internationals Network for Public Schools and the New York Performance Standards Consortium. 17:11 So thank you all to those of you who have contributed to that and some discussion prompts that I would use within that Socratic seminar would be something like what's the formula for effective activism or effective civic engagement, or eradicating oppression, whatever. What's the formula for effective activism or effective civic engagement? Or, you know, eradicating oppression, whatever. What's the ideal balance of shared identity spaces and inclusion? So this idea of like affinity spaces and having this preserved space where you know you can be with people who share an identity that is, in really oppressive spaces, unwelcomed right, that is, in really oppressive spaces, unwelcomed right, and like wanting that inclusive, potentially healing space for allies and people who are identifying in these affinity spaces to really come together and heal together. Like what is that ideal balance and who gets to decide that right? That could be really interesting to explore. 18:01 What would it look like if everyone was able to thrive? You could probably. If you're familiar with my podcast and my resources in the past, you could tell I'm using some of these sentence starters that I often share. So feel free to use the beginning of any of these sentences as well and kind of make your own ending or create, of course, something completely different. Here's another one what would it look like if communities interrupted harm every time it happened. So again that radical imagining, like let's imagine that was really awesome. What would that actually look like? And so you can kind of name a really awesome element of society or community and say, hey, what would that look like? Or what would it take to get there? 18:38 And here's, I think, probably my favorite how do you imagine a thriving fantasy or literary community? And so I think that one really sets us up nicely to brainstorm collectively some ideas as a group. Because what I envision being the project for a unit like that would be that students then write their own kind of fantasy or literary piece, short story or something, and they could do it collaboratively. A small group, whole class, could do like an anthology, right, and kind of like do something together. Or it could be just like a purely individual endeavor. I think that's fine. But I love the idea of like we're going to study this kind of radical imagining, activist strategy as fantasy book connected to current events and you going to study this kind of radical imagining, activist strategy as fantasy book connected to current events and you get to do your own after the study and reading of this one. So I think that could be a super cool unit and I also want to name just the writing workshop process being really integral to something like that. So using all of those ideas from their stories, their voices super cool. I think I would totally love to play with that idea. 19:46 If someone does this, please let me know. I'd be really excited to hear how that goes and learn from you and also thinking about, of course it's always on my mind now Dr Asawa Noy's work on dimension-based rubrics and dimension-based assessment To really make sure that we are getting a peer response, not just the teacher's response. Based assessment, to really make sure that we are getting a peer response, not just the teacher's response, so the peers and you as the educator would be sharing. You know what was your reader experience of the student's writing and giving that feedback. So again, there's that interplay, like it's not just this one particular standard we are measuring on and that's what you get feedback on. It's actually the interplay of what I wrote down and how people are reading and experiencing that writing and what they're thinking about, what connections they're drawing is actually kind of the beauty of the piece of writing, specifically when we're talking about current events and oppression and radical imagining and activism and making the world and community a better place that we all are living in. I think this is such a beautiful opportunity to leverage an equitable assessment protocol like that. 20:45 So that is the episode we are going to link to the freebie for this episode in the blog post. That's going to be our curriculum playlist. So a ton of different things there for you. That is going to be located at lindsaybethlyonscom slash blog, slash 224. Until next time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Time for Teachership is now a proud member of the...
AuthorLindsay Lyons is an educational justice coach who helps schools and districts co-create feminist, antiracist civics-based curricula, discussion opportunities, and equitable policies that challenge, affirm, and inspire all students. A former NYC public school teacher, she holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Lindsay believes all students deserve literacy, criticality, and leadership skills. Archives
March 2026
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed