3.13 How to Take on A Sea of Troubles with Authors Liz and Bill James

Elizabeth (Liz) and Bill James are public high school English teachers in Stockton, California. They are both accomplished authors and are promoting their most recent publication, A Sea of Troubles: Pairing Literary and Informational Texts to Address Social Inequality, which was published in May of 2021. At the beginning of 2020, Liz and Bill started writing A Sea of Troubles and wrote the bulk of this book while in quarantine as the world was changing drastically around us all. We are so fortunate to have Liz and Bill on with us to discuss how they aim to show educators at the secondary level, that fiction often reflects the real world and vice versa, and that the texts teachers are already using can be catalysts to dive into deeper discussions about social injustices that are happening today. A Sea of Troubles is a practical and purposeful guide for secondary English teachers to be able to use literary work already present in their classrooms to address social issues. Liz and Bill masterfully orchestrate the units to demonstrate how to broach a current societal issue of injustice while keeping the focus directly on the novel/play/primary document that is being studied. The chapters are broken into themes and the texts that are implemented are just examples of what can be utilized, but Liz and Bill leave the unit outlines open enough for teachers to make it their own using whatever texts they see fit. Some of the themes include Syntactical Othering, Systemic Racial Injustice, Abuses of Power, Authoritarianism, Genocide and Ethnic Internment, and Gender Inequality. Buy their book here!  Bill James: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-james-800b22a3/ and Liz James: https://www.facebook.com/elizabeth.james.9022