Investigating Local Food: Meet Your Washington Farmers
June Johnson Bube, Seattle University
This assignment sequence seeks to stimulate students' thinking and writing about food production in the western Washington bioregion through a series of activities combining readings, class discussion, fieldwork, and writing assignments. Collaborative work in and outside of class culminates in students' interviewing local farmers and vendors at farmers markets and writing a surprising informative essay.

Our World, Our Selves
Tim Walsh, South Seattle Community College
Students will understand how ethics and psycho-emotional factors influence our relationship to and our use of the natural world. Students will read, mark, and summarize text and will use writing as a tool to explore the connections between ethics, psychology, and sustainability.

Building a Public Knowledge Base: The Wikicadia Node Assignment
Todd Lundberg, Cascadia Community College
The center of this sequence of assignments is a collaborative, "New Media" writing project that involves publishing to a wiki a synthesis of knowledge about how humans inhabit places. Writers work in groups with others interested in a common sub-topic and develop information related to local places that local audiences who are invited to join the wiki may use.

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.

Volcanoes Writing Assignment
Julie Baldwin, University of Montana
Students write an original work of fiction pertaining to the geology of stratovolcanoes and their eruptive hazards.

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.

Sustainability and Cultural Stories
Jon Jensen, Luther College