Hi, everyone. This week I’m sharing a conversation with Nick Fuller Googins, who teaches fourth grade in Saco, Maine. He’s also the author of “The Great Transition,” a novel about a future in which people have come together to cut emissions to net zero and halt planetary collapse. The book focuses on a family that’s been relocated to Nuuk, Greenland. The mother, Kristina, and father, Larch, hold different views on retribution for former oil executives and other “climate criminals,” a tension that appears in the school assignments of their teenage daughter, Emi. Googins had a lot to share on teaching about climate change, restorative justice, collective action and more. Hope you enjoy it! Wishing you a restful holiday and I look forward to connecting in the new year. — Caroline PrestonThe interview:This interview has been edited for clarity and length. How did you come up with the idea for this book? I had a summer job between tutoring and teaching, installing solar panels. I was the grunt worker for a small solar company in midcoast Maine, and my job was mostly bringing solar panels up the ladder. I really loved it. This was around the time that [U.S. Rep.] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had won her upset primary. I began to hear about the Green New Deal. I was feeling pretty despondent about climate change, and this was the first time I’d heard of a hopeful plan, something that could actually save us. I started thinking about what if this somehow passed and they established something like a solar corps. I would fantasize about that, driving home from work, and then that spark turned into one of the prompts we use in fourth grade writing: “What is the story you wish existed in the world?” For me it was regular working people mobilizing together to transform the world.
People succeed in the book in coming together and taking collective action to keep the climate crisis from worsening. It seems to me that collective action isn’t a regular part of our schooling, but could it be? What role do you think education should play in encouraging people to take collective action and give them the skills to do it? Credit: Image provided by Atria BooksI find myself constantly repeating to my students that we are one of very few social species on the planet. There are very few social species that literally can’t live alone. We will die on our own or we’ll go mentally crazy. I am telling them we only work, we only survive and thrive, when working together, we are meant to be in groups. I don’t know what effect it will have but it’s something I try to weave into all disciplines.The other thing I try to do is a lot of role plays for social studies and history. We have a unit on the Industrial Revolution. I make sure to teach about the economics of it, which includes the labor movement and why we don’t have little kids working in factories anymore and why we have weekends. We role play a model factory. I am the factory owner and s
Sab. Gen 11th, 2025
