What if students could step inside the world of Sherlock Holmes, walking the streets of Victorian London, solving mysteries, and using coding and robotics to crack the case?
Through the Cindy Edelman Excellence in Teaching Fellowship, LouAnn Brown, a teacher at River City Science Academy, traveled to London to study the literary and historical world of Sherlock Holmes and transform that experience into an interdisciplinary classroom project.
The Cindy Edelman Excellence in Teaching Fellowship gives outstanding educators the opportunity to travel, study, and return with ideas that enrich their classrooms and schools. By connecting teachers with meaningful learning experiences around the world, the fellowship helps bring authentic, engaging instruction back to Duval County students.
The fellowship experience in London deepened LouAnn’s understanding of literature, inspired a new interdisciplinary curriculum, and sparked ideas for a digital resource hub that other educators can use.
During the fellowship, LouAnn immersed herself in the places that inspired Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective. She visited the Sherlock Holmes Museum, joined a walking tour through historic London streets, explored themed experiences, and saw the landmarks mentioned in the stories. Standing in Holmes’s study and examining artifacts from Victorian life made the stories feel real in a way that reading alone never could. The experience revealed how setting shapes storytelling, and how place can become a character of its own.
The trip directly inspired a new “Sherlock Holmes Mystery Project” for her gifted classroom. The unit blends literature, geography, and STEM through project-based learning. Students will explore Victorian London while applying deductive reasoning through coding, robotics, and investigative challenges modeled after Holmes’s methods. The project transforms classic literature into a hands-on experience, helping students build critical thinking skills while staying deeply engaged with the text.
To share the experience beyond her own classroom, LouAnn plans to build a digital resource hub featuring photos, videos, and learning materials from her fellowship. The site will introduce each Sherlock Holmes story with real-world context, along with worksheets, reading guides, and STEM-based activities. The goal is to give both students and fellow teachers tools to explore literature through inquiry, design challenges, and cross-curricular learning.
The fellowship did more than fund a trip; it transformed a classic text into an immersive, interdisciplinary learning experience. By connecting literature to real places and hands-on investigation, the teacher is helping students see stories not as distant works of the past, but as living worlds they can explore and analyze.
LouAnn’s students may never walk the streets of Victorian London, but thanks to the Cindy Edelman Excellence in Teaching fellowship, they’ll soon be solving mysteries there every day.