250. Stories & Civic Imagination to Elicit Shared Class Values

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In this episode, host Lindsay Lyons delves into the transformative power of stories and civic imagination. She draws on insights from the book, "Practicing Futures: A Civic Imagination Handbook" by Gabriel Peters-Lazaro and Sangita Shresthova, offering strategies to help educators, leaders, and community facilitators co-create shared values and community agreements. 

She emphasizes the importance of imagination as a process to bridge differences and foster action-oriented discussions within classrooms and larger community settings. Lindsay also offers practical ways to guide a 60-minute session to co-create shared values as a group.

Why? 
The concept of civic imagination is essential in fostering environments where community members can envision and enact change. Lindsay shares the distinction made by the authors that civic action is distinct from political power struggles, focusing on shared beliefs, values, and trust that facilitate collective action. Pop culture often influences civic imagination, allowing communities to express social concerns and envision new possibilities for democracy and social justice.

Lindsay emphasizes the fact that imagination is both individual and collective and, as educators, we can draw on that collective imagination to address the real issues and open up possibilities for brand new solutions.

What?
Drawing on the insights from the “Practicing Futures” handbook, here’s Lindsay’s 60-minute session outline to help implement a civic imagination workshop, whether with educators as professional development or with your students. 

Step 1: Begin with an opening circle where participants share stories of fictional characters or real persons who inspire them to think about the future. This sets the stage for community building by sharing personally. (10 minutes.)

Step 2: Share an opening frame for the session such as, for example, introducing a guiding quote. Lindsay shares one from Henry Jenkins: “ Before we can change the world, we have to be able to envision the possibility of change. We have to be able to imagine what kinds of change would be desirable. And we have to be able to think of ourselves as people capable of making change. This is what we are calling the civic imagination.” (5 minutes.)

Step 3: Facilitate a collective brainstorming session where attendees imagine something new and transformational. A prompt might be: “Imagine it’s 2056. What would an amazing learning experience feel like, sound like, or look like?” Encourage fantastical thinking by suspending realistic constraints. As the facilitator, you could set the tone by coming up with your own response that is fantastical and creative. (15 minutes.)

Step 4: Now, after imagining these future scenarios, get the participants in small groups to start creating stories of how you’re going to get there and create a path to the envisioned future. Groups should incorporate elements from each member's ideas and engage in multimodal storytelling techniques. (15 minutes.)

Step 5: Have the groups share what they came up with, either by physically acting it out or creating “freeze frames” about what is happening. People could also draw and share through a gallery walk. Conclude by discussing the values and actions identified through the stories. Encourage reflection on how imagination guided the storytelling process and how these insights can integrate into real-life practices and policies. (15 minutes.)

Final Tip
Encourage participants to view imagination as a powerful tool to navigate civic life and foster dynamic community interactions.
To help you implement today’s takeaways, I’m sharing my Values via Civic Imagination slides with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 250 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: 

• 6:51 “ We have this imagination that we often celebrate as an individual thing in students: ‘Oh, that student is so creative,’ or, ‘That student's super artistic.’ But we don't cultivate that collectively as part of a whole class activity.”
• 21:15 “ We just painted this vision that we all care about, that we think there is a path forward—however fantastical—but we think there's a path forward to actually get there.

We just made those stories and so how might we help this vision come to life in our school? We can invite conversation: How do we do that? How do we get students and school stakeholders to talk about these shared values? How do we get ourselves to practice and lift up these shared values that we just identified are important through story?”

​​If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:

TRANSCRIPT
Lindsay Lyons: Welcome back to the Time for teachership podcast. This is episode 250. Wow. Today we are talking about stories and civic imagination as an avenue to elicit shared class values and ultimately co-construct community agreements for discourse for how to be together in classroom or a larger school community.
The context for this episode is that I've read the book, practicing Futures, A Civic Imagination Handbook. Uh, that is absolutely amazing. Uh, Peters Lazaro and stress Dova are the authors. They are fantastic. They also have a website with a bunch of, I actually think you could get the book on the website for free.
And they also have a lot of images and slides and agendas for the variety of workshops they share. So it is truly an amazing resource. I wanna share a little bit of my ahas from the book and then walk you through kinda an adapted version of one of their workshops that I've tried to fit into a smaller time span for use.
In, in my setting, like conferences, right? Because we usually have 45 to 60 minutes. Similarly, I think leaders and teachers who are working directly with students as well as any other facilitators of communities. So this could be, um, family or PTA spaces as well. Uh, it could even just be like family units right at home.
I think there's so much value in this, um, after school programs and the applications are really truly endless. But I wanted to share kind of a backdrop, some guiding ideas, and then walk you through what you could do in like a 60 minute. A spot of time, wherever and with whomever that is for you to have kind of a co-creation of shared values as a group and get to those via stories and civic imagination.
So here we go. I love their distinction right up front at the start of the book. In the forward actually. Um, so it's, it's actually not the authors, but civics versus politics in the Forward is distinguished as. Follows The civic represents the shared beliefs and values, the underlying trust, which makes collective action possible.
While the political encapsulates struggles over power within the decision making process and end quote. So you have a lot of structure, right, and, and kind of power dynamics and negotiating of influence in the political sphere, the civic. Is more in my mind, community, right? It's the community piece. It's the shared beliefs and values.
It's the trust, it's the relationships. That's what enables us to take action. And the action might be, uh, in the political space. It often is in, in the political space, but it is. N not the same as like, um, fighting over power, divorced from the community piece, which I, I just think that's such an interesting distinction.
Um, and I love it. Also, they talk about imagination, right? So the whole book is on, um, civic imagination that's in the subtitle, and they talk about imagination as process. And again, this actually comes from the forward, but here's the quote, something we actively produce together. It goes on to say it allows otherwise opposing groups to find a path forward together.
End quote. I love this idea because opposing groups is what we're seeing. Play out what we're witnessing. Play out in many public spaces, in political discourse, in in general discourse. And our goal, and what we often talk about in the podcast is thinking about how we actually bring together in community people across differences of opinion so that we can live generatively together so we don't violate human dignity, right?
And so if imagination is, is thought of as a process where we're actively. Coming together across differences, across differing ideologies to forge kind of a path forward. I love this as a possibility. Um, they also talk about how it's really notable the authors now we're talking about state, that groups frequently throughout history have tapped into pop culture to translate and express social concerns, which is so cool because you see that kind of come up in their workshops and in throughout their book, how tapping into pop culture.
It actually feels like a nice avenue forward by considering what elements of pop culture figures, um, what elements of our superheroes or our kind of shared stories that Netflix show that everyone watched, you know, whatever it is. How can we tap into elements of that or values that underlie that character's actions in the world, even if it's fictional to kind of express social concerns about the reality we are living in.
And think about how those values or actions of those fictional folks actually kind of come to, uh, can come to fruition in our lives, to advance justice and help us live better together. They also talk about the others, talk about the shared values. That, uh, the importance being of shared values, that it supports the functions and structures of democracy.
And so they're talking about how effective democracy really requires its members to feel their ideas are valued and that the system values them. I think that's where a lot of people are very disillusioned or angry with. Um. Our current systems in the United States anyways, as we record this in early 2026, um, of, of perceived democracy because there is not that feeling of my ideas are valued, I am valued by the system.
Um, and so this idea of shared values, particularly in systems like schools where we can co-construct with authority figures such as teachers or leaders in those spaces, really is going to support. The, the truth of democracy, the real functioning of democracy, because it's an opportunity to co-create, be fully valued in the process of that co-creation and notice the policy implications and kind of ways of being, uh, that are present in those systems in a way that maybe isn't when we don't co-create, or we don't even talk about values, right?
Or we talk about values, but put them on the wall and don't do anything with them. Um, I love this point about Maxine Green saying imagination is individual and collective. So again, we have this imagination that we often celebrate as an individual thing in students, oh, that student is so creative, or that student's super artistic.
We don't cultivate that collectively as part of a whole class activity or part of a prompt or, or even assessment that is. I want you to civically imagine and we're gonna actually, that's gonna be the focus of our conversation and we're gonna build off each other. 'cause we're always better together.
Right? I'm again thinking about, but thinking a lot about his, uh, words. But James Nottingham is talking about when we talk, we want to help each other say something new or think about something in a new way. We want to expand our thinking. And recently having worked with a bunch of educators on a, uh, student led discourse workshop.
In pursuing the goal of student led discourse, many, many teachers who are doing amazing things have said one of the hardest things is to get students to build on each other, to listen deeply to each other, and to build something new together as opposed to just reiterating what they thought going into the conversation.
This is such a hard thing and such an important thing, and so again, Maxine Green saying imagination is individual and collective. I think this is such a great space and opportunity to build that skill. The last framing I will share before I dive into to this is, uh, the authors say, quote, when you start with creativity and imagination, you don't abandon the real problems.
Ah, so important. Okay? They go on to say rather, you learn to approach and see them in brand new ways, opening up possibilities for brand new solutions. End quote. I love this because I think a common pushback is, oh well we can't just like dream up this space that is gonna be so hard to get to, that's gonna be quote unquote impossible to get to.
Right? We have to live in the, now we have to be realistic. Right? This is such a interesting polarity or tension that is common and I actually think would be super fruitful to position as a prompt for discussion and discourse in, in the classroom space. Is this polarity, uh, of. Realism and optimism. I, I think that is so crucial and intergenerationally that conversation, that polarity, that kind of value tension can bring up so many interesting perspectives and stories that underlie those perspectives.
This could be really, really fruitful, but I think even just posing this idea, right, or posing this quote for conversation amongst students, amongst faculty, amongst a mixed group of students and faculty, Ooh, this would be so good. Families and students, right? Intergenerational conversations would love that.
Okay. So we're not abandoning the real problems. We're learning to approach them in new ways. We're opening up possibilities for brand new solutions. Okay, keep that in mind. Here we go. We're gonna transition to thinking about like, how, what does this look like? Okay. How is this gonna happen and how can we start doing something like this in a span of time that's maybe only 60 minutes at a staff meeting.
Right. Or, or 60 minutes at, uh, if you have 60 minutes, uh, for something like an advisory period or a community block. Right. Okay. So here's what I would say, and I'm gonna link. In the description, um, in the, excuse me, show notes, uh, for this episode, I'm gonna link this slide deck that, again, is based on this practicing futures book, uh, resources from them, from how they've done things.
But they've often done things in like a multi-hour, like half day session. And so I'm just kind of truncating this quite a bit to try to think about how this might be practical for you in 60 minutes or, or even less. So feel free to adapt this, um, download it. Adapt it to how you need it, um, that is going to be located for folks who are driving, we'll drop this link, of course, in the extended show notes, but that will be lindsay beth lyons.com/blog/ 2 5 0, and you'll be able to find that there.
Okay, so here we go. First thing I would do is. Start with an opening circle where we're sharing a story. So ideally, this is not the first time that we're ever meeting someone. However I have, and we'll continue to try to do this in conferences where we're bringing people who've never met each other before into a space.
Um, this requires a bit more vulnerability when folks don't know each other but is possible. Okay, here's the opening prompt. Share a story or character or real person, for sure. You could also do that, but I'm just leaning into that pop culture idea here. That inspires you to think of the future. I would also just have a line on the slide here or a cue verbally to let them know.
This could be a book, a movie, a TV show, a song like Get Creative and Think about who inspires you. I recently did this a couple of days ago with a team. That was just like a person. I, I think I said it could be fictional, but we actually as a, as a group, um, leaned very heavily into the real people in our lives.
So much so that I don't think one person brought in a fictional person. So feel free to lean as much in as much into either direction you want. Okay. So you're sharing someone that inspires you to think of the future. Okay. Once everyone has shared, we have brought the personal in. We have shared who inspires us.
We've shared it succinctly. I'm thinking this is 10 minutes. So if you have a group of 20 people, you know, you're sharing 30 seconds each quick, maybe two sentences, one sentence to describe who they are and kind of what they embody, what they do. Maybe one sentence to explain why that's important to you or how you kind of came to be connected with that person.
Um, or character. And then we move on. So we have kind of this community building. Okay. Then I would share an kind of an o, an opening frame, or if you're doing traditional circle format, this frame can go first and then you can have the, the circle. Um. As kind of like the main circle activity and then close out the circle formally, that's fine too.
Um, I'm just kind of mixing it up a little bit 'cause I think it's a nice segue. This would be a quote from Henry Jensen Jenkins, uh, on civic imaginations, kind of how it guides action. So the quote would be, before we can change the world, we have to be able to envision the possibility of change. We have to be able to imagine what kinds of change would be desirable.
And we have to be able to think of ourselves. As people capable of making change, this is what we are calling the civic imagination. So I think this is a nice segue, although we could also work first because we just had people talking about who inspires us towards change, and now we're making the transition to think about how we could embody that sense of like change agency.
Right. We have, I love that we have to be able to think of ourselves as people capable of making change. Okay. So then what I would say is kind of learn our hats on, let's do a thing that you could do with students, um, if you're working with staff. Otherwise we're just kind of just proceeding with, with students.
Um, if you're working as a teacher through the stack. Yeah. And the, the prompt would be we're gonna collectively brainstorm a future world and I, you know, they typically make it like 30 years out, so, okay. It's 2056. Right. What would an amazing experience, a learning experience, schooling experience, whatever it is for you, what would it feel like?
Sound like look like? Like what would the experience be like? Describe the amazing learning experience and I'm changing it right now 'cause I had school experience. I think learning is more expansive. Invite people to share just one sentence and also I think this is really, really, really important. Tell them temporarily suspend realistic constraints like the fantastical is possible, is language that they use the book.
I love that the fantastical is possible. We did this at a conference, uh, at NCSS in 2025 with Erica Carr and myself. And, uh, we had one person get really fantastical. They were like, time travel field trips. And I was like, yes. And everyone else was like, oh, I want students to feel loved. Okay, great. Love it.
Love that. Students can feel loved. I also think that's very possible tomorrow. Like I don't think we need 30 years for that. Right? Like what? Might we, what is so transformational that it would take 30 years to enact, to come to life, right? I think that's the framing we want. And if you would like, I often do this when I'm doing circle shares, if you wanna set the stage that might affect how others answer and so you can be the one to share your idea first and get really creative.
Think in advance if you're the facilitator. What's a super time travel field trip? There you go. Handing that one to you. Gift from a participant at NCSS, but. Share something that is going to set the stage for the fantastical thinking and get folks to, if they were gonna say something like, oh, I want students to feel happy, like.
Get them to transform that into something a little bit grander, right? So I also love think time. I would give people like, you know, three minutes to think here, draw a picture, write a key word, like do your independent thinking. Get them to really push their thinking. You could even share yours and then pause and say, we're gonna give everyone time to think, because they may have thought and then they were like, oh no, that wasn't fantastical enough.
Right. I think this whole circle share could be about 15 minutes. I mean, these, these first two activities are really like almost half the session. But then after everyone has shared their ideas, here's what we do. We say, okay, we're in 2056. These things have happened. How do we get there? And we are going to retroactively as a group, create the stories that got us there.
So they're gonna form a group, three to five people. Choose one of the topics. So ideally, someone's kind of charting. Maybe you as the facilitator are charting some of these ideas as people are sharing in the circle. So we have some different topical themes come up, choose a subtopic, choose a theme. Each group gets a different one.
Uh, you know, write your number, uh, the group number next to it on the chart, your initials on the chart so other people know what's taken. And then you're gonna get into a group. And there's a couple things you could do here. You could do kind of like a formal, uh, discourse protocol, like a discussion diamond.
And work through kind of your own ideas for a story. Everyone writes their ideas down and they kind of share very formal, structured, kind of share their ideas. Um, and then they have some time to kind of, you're gonna have some time to remix. Like, how do we integrate everyone's individual ideas into one cohesive story that borrows at at least one element from each individual in this group?
Right? Um, you would have a, a story that. Has a character or group at the center, a conflict that they face and a resolution that ultimately gets them to that future we described. Now, you could also do this in a variety of other ways. You could make it way more multimodal, you could make it way more artistic.
Um, you could have like a storyboard. So I'm thinking about the elementary kind of storyboards, where it's like, okay, here's the character. We're gonna draw a picture of the character. Here's the conflict that they face. Like, that's the middle box. Here's the third box. This is the resolution. And you could draw a picture and or caption it to kind of set the scene.
Okay, so then once you've had that small group time, and I'm thinking about 20 minutes here, um, so another kind of large chunk of time, um. I'm now wondering if I made this like a 75 minute activity, but you can adjust any of these pieces that you'd like or you could cut out whole activities if you'd like.
Um, but basically what we now wanna do, uh, is give a few minutes for one or more groups de depending on how long a time slot you have here, each group could kind of share out for just like 60 seconds I think is all, all that's needed. Um, you can act out. Like physically act out, uh, key pieces of your story and have one person kind of do a voiceover, uh, kind of like a skit style.
But I actually find that skits can be really, um, hard for particularly adults. Uh, but skits can be hard. But what you could do is you could have kind of like a, I don't remember what they're called, but where you physically kind of move. You have like a moving, um. Seen like almost like you're a statue and so you have kind of like these three freeze frames and so you as a group are kind of freeze frame one, and then you have one person kind of talk through what's happening here.
Okay. Freeze frame two and, and it's easier for the group to kind of move but not verbally share. And then just one person kind of reads through the notes and verbalizes you also as a group, if you're. If you've got some visual artists, you could do a kind of mini mural or drawing and then have one person kind of explain that or even just hang up the mini murals, maybe capture them a little bit so we know what we're looking at, but kind of do a gallery walk where we're walking around there.
Um, I think a nice audience move here as you are either kind of watching and or listening or engaging in gallery walk is just to notice what values are coming up. What do you infer the values of this group or this story Were. And then we're kind of charting them. Um, and now I think that what happens next, again, if you're working with staff, um, you're gonna have kind of this teacher hat moment of like, how could I bring this activity to students?
If you're working directly with students or your purpose is really just to do this with staff, I don't think you need the, how do I teach this kind of side of things. Um, but I do think there is. This sense of, you know, what values came up for us. So we have, you know, 10 minutes of discussion here. Maybe what values came up in the stories, like let's name those.
You might have jotted them on your own individual paper, but let's get them out in the space. What actions were present. Like what did people in these stories do? Were they young people? Were they adults? Were they working together in youth adult partnerships? So cool. Right. And what did you notice about your experience of the civic imagining process of the story creation and synthesizing with team?
Like what did you notice about yourself and other participants, other peers in this process of doing this thing? Like how do we communicate with one another perhaps differently? Than we normally would when we're talking about social issues and how can imagination serve us in our civic lives. This is a question from the book that I really, really love, so I wanted to work that in.
Um, but I love this idea of imagination serving us in civic lives. So how do we like kind of just put that out there? Maybe not as a question, maybe it's just a, oh, what a cool thought. Um, and maybe that's something you end on, I think another kind of. Angle to look at this with is like, we just painted this vision that we all care about, that we think there is a path forward, however fantastical, but we think there's a path forward to actually get there.
We just made those stories and so how might we, or how can we, how will we, right? Whatever verb you wanna use, help this vision come to life in our school and so. We can invite conversation, like how do we do that? How do we get students and school stakeholders to talk about these shared values? How do we get ourselves to practice and lift up these shared values that we just identified are important through story?
How do we make that a living part of the way we are in the school and the way school is, and the way we are as a community together? How do we nurture actions in our classrooms? How do we make sure our policies are reflective of this? What pedagogical moves, uh, can we borrow? We're if we're students that we can, or sorry if we're teachers and then we can use the students or, uh, what moves can we use?
Um, if you're doing this with a group of family members and caregivers. Like, what can we share with our, our kind of family units, right? Our, our children and the home space. So that is a long list of things. Uh, don't feel like you need to remember that all or take notes because you do have access to these slides for absolutely free.
Again, they are based on a fantastic book, kind of truncated as much as possible to like this 60 to 75 minute range. Feel free to edit and adjust more. I'm sure I will actually go in and as of this time of recording in January, 2026, they look one way and they're gonna probably exist in a very different way as I iterate and do this with different groups and, and learn as the authors of that book did, what works well and what can be adjusted so.
I will continue updating live in this Google Slide deck. So if you're listening in 2027, this may look different than I'm describing now. And good for you. You've got the updated version. So again, that is going to be [email protected] slash blog slash 2 5 0. You can go ahead and grab that resource, uh, make it your own, make a copy, edit it to your heart's content, and let me know how it goes for you.

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