Responding to Climate Change: Researching Community Resilience
Holly Hughes, Peninsula College
This is the final activity in a quarter long-focus on place/sustainability in an English 101 class in which, working as teams, students research non-profit organizations in their community who are working to build resilience as well as participate in a service learning/volunteer project sponsored by the organization. As a team, they then design a multi-media presentation that analyzes/discusses how the organization is responding to climate change and evaluates its effectiveness using criteria we've generated together.

Ecological Autobiography
Maureen Ryan, Western Washington University
The ecological autobiography is a multi-stage reflective and written exercise that draws on students' personal history and experiences as they consider the ecological context of some period of their lives. The goal is to individually and collectively explore how the landscapes and ecological communities we have inhabited influence us as individuals, set the context of our lives, and influence our expectations of landscape.

Mapping Place, Writing Home: Using Interactive Compositions On and Off the Trail
Kate Reavey, Peninsula College
Students will choose a physical place to study, a site that is close enough to visit at least four times during the quarter/semester. Using writing prompts, text-based research, and close observations in the "field" (the chosen place), students will create a "mashup" of spatially referenced pop-up balloons. These will include researched and narrative prose, citations and links, and some visual images, embedded into a map via Google Earth technology. Through this unique presentation, the research and writing can encourage viewers to better understand the place they have chosen to study.

Recognizing the Impact of Dominant Culture Privilege
Robin Jeffers, Bellevue Community College
This sequence of five assignments, starting with the study of texts, has students taking a look at the concept of dominant culture privilege and then moving them out into their own world to analyze what they're seeing there.

Extending "The Land Ethic" and The Golden Rule to the Whole Biotic Community
Don Foran, The Evergreen State College and Centralia College
A component of an Introduction to Ethics course involving research and reporting on a specific sustainability issue. The class presentation will help the student think about extending Leopold's "Land Ethic" and "The Golden Rule" to the whole biotic community.

Maps and Legends: (Re)placing Composition
Jared Leising, Cascadia Community College
Because maps tell stories, offer perspectives, and make arguments, maps also act as a metaphor for the writing assignments students are given. The writing that students do in this class creates maps to where students have been (writing stories from memory), where they currently are (writing profiles from observations of places), and where they're headed. This course approaches sustainability from the viewpoint of learning to value the places in which we live through listening to and telling stories about those places.

Transportation: Waterways to Interstate Highways
Charles Luckmann, Skagit Valley College
Students practice open-ended inquiry, guided inquiry, synthesis and expository writing as they explore personal and public modes of transportation, past and present, in the Puget Sound bioregion. This activity can be adapted to any region.

Writing and Walking, Pilgrimage and Process: Working with the Essays of Linda Hogan & Henry David Thoreau
Rebecca Chamberlain, The Evergreen State College
By comparing and contrasting the essays of Hogan and Thoreau, students begin to develop a more complex understanding of their own identity and sense of place; the historical and cultural context around issues of sustainability and environmental ethics.

Don't Just Do Something, Sit There: Suggestions for Observing in Nature
Jean MacGregor, The Evergreen State College
A workshop for enabling students to sit quietly and observantly in the natural world.

A Sense of Place Collage Essay
Kathleen Byrd, South Puget Sound Community College
The "collage essay" is a formal writing assignment for English 101. The "collage" format of this paper offers students the opportunity to explore a sense of place from multiple perspectives without needing to demonstrate a stance as is usually expected in a thesis-driven essay.