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.

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.

Civic Stewardship and Interdependency: Rethinking Our Local Patterns of Consumption and Development
Tara DerYeghiayan Roth, Seattle University
This "Exploratory Essay" writing assignment asks students to acknowledge themselves as stakeholders in their communities, to take a closer look at the urban or suburban town they call home, and to re-examine notions of entitlement.

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.