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.

Story as a Place Happening Many Times: Imaginative Writing Activity
Nancy Pagh, Western Washington University
Students are encouraged to perceive specific locations within our bioregion as having a life that includes past, present, and future. These activities present ideas for wedding the teaching of "craft" with the teaching of sustainability.

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.

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.

Urban Design and Identity
Julianne Seeman and Robin Jeffers, Bellevue Community College
Students will learn to apply theories-of urban design and of regional identity formation and, understand how designed environments promote behavior and how urban design can promote behaviors that protect the environment.

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.

Reading & Writing Poetry as Contemplative Practice
Holly Hughes, Edmonds Community College
These activities offer ways to incorporate contemplative practice into the teaching of reading and writing poetry, with specific handouts/assignments and sample poems provided.