Bioneers Education Community
- Michael Pollan
Bioneers is a thriving network of visionary innovators who are working with nature to heal nature and offer practical solutions for restoring the Earth and people. A core component of this network is a community of educators, working to bring these concepts and solutions into the classrooms, schools and institutions that they call home. We’re honored and excited to be able to provide inspirational and practical materials and events that educators can utilize to help nourish the next generation of bioneers.
Here's a quick guide that should help you to get the most out of this website and Bioneers. As an educator, there are several ways that we invite you to interact with Bioneers.
What is available at Bioneers.org?
The Education section of the website, www.bioneers.org/education, serves as a home for educators on the Bioneers website, featuring news and articles directly relevant to educators. We encourage you to explore the rest of the website from your perspective as an educator, including our featured interest areas including Food and Farming, Youth Leadership, Ecological Design and others.
Attend (And Bring Your Class) to a Bioneers Conference Near You
The Bioneers Conference is an amazing learning opportunity for students and teachers alike. We encourage teachers and their classes to attend as groups. Scholarships are available for individual educators under the age of 30 and for educators attending with their classes. The Bioneers Conference can also fill professional development requirements, through our CEU partnership with San Francisco State University.
For more information, visit these pages:
- Bioneers Conference
- Local Satellite Conference in your Region
- Information on Available Scholarships
Bring Bioneers Into Your Classroom
Video and Audio Materials:
Some of the most insightful and brilliant thinkers of our generation regularly speak at the Bioneers Conference leading to a vast archive of video presentations and an award winning radio series. These highly accessible 30-minute presentations on a wide range of social and environmental issues are a great way to begin or deepen in-class discussions.
“I teach a course on Sustainable Living at Utah State University that uses the Bioneers videos quite a bit. I find them to be great discussion starters, and they are nice, thought-provoking introductions to a wide array of environmental topics. I think they would also be great in a survey course where you don't have time to do lengthy readings on each topic.”- Kerry Case, Utah State University
The Bioneers Book Series:
This growing collection offers inspiring stories and essays by Bioneers visionaries and activists at the forefront of environmental and social restoration. These foundational works are increasingly finding their way into classrooms and educational institutions.
“The students in my Ecological Design classes just love Nature’s Operating Instructions as a text.”
- John Todd, visionary ecological designer and Distinguished Lecturer at University of Vermont, Burlington.
Help Others Bring Bioneers Into Their Classrooms
Visit Teaching Bioneers to explore, create, upload and share your lesson plans, curricula, comments and feedback. Explore the educational resources already created and generously shared by teachers and professors from around the country. Find something that will work for your class? Borrow it and let the community know how it worked. Created something on your own? Share it with the rest of us.
Propose an Article or Interview for the Education section of Bioneers.org
This space is for you. Do you have an article that you’ve been itching to write? A mentor, thinker or bioneer that you’d love to get the chance to interview from your perspective as a teacher? We work with a number of partner organizations to create content for this website and invite you, the Bioneers Educator's Community, to contribute your stories and ideas to this space. Send an e-mail to education(at)bioneers.org with any thoughts, questions or ideas that you have.
The compelling stories of the Bioneers — told at our annual conference and simultaneous satellite conferences across North America, and in our radio and book series — demonstrate over and over how great a difference one individual can make.
- Kenny Ausubel, founder of Bioneers
Education Content Partners
We gratefully acknowledge the following partner organizations that contribute content, ideas and knowledge to these pages.
The Center for Ecoliteracy, (www.ecoliteracy.org), is a public foundation, located in Berkeley, CA, whose mission is education for sustainable living. It has been a pioneer in providing tools, reasoning, and support for combining hands-on experience in the natural world with curricular innovation in K–12 education. The Center administers a grant program, presents at regional and national meetings of educators and change makers, and publishes extensively online and in print through its own imprint and other media. The Center offers seminars and technical assistance in support of systemic change, convenes networks of its grantees, sponsors projects, and administers donor-advised funds.
The Green Schools Initiative, (www.greenschools.net), was founded in 2004 by parent-environmentalists who were shocked by how un-environmental their kids’ schools were and mobilized to improve the environmental health and ecological sustainability of schools in the U.S. We believe it is essential to protect children’s health – at school and in the world beyond school – and we work to catalyze and support “green” actions by kids, teachers, parents, and policymakers to eliminate toxics, use resources sustainably, create green spaces and buildings, serve healthy food, and teach stewardship. We are working to leverage the schools sector to transform the school environment – and the markets that supply schools – to improve health and sustainability. Using the Precautionary Principle as our policy foundation, we are advocating that school boards and state policymakers develop comprehensive action plans and build the local capacity to implement these plans.
The Association for Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, (www.aashe.org) is a membership-based association of colleges and universities working to advance sustainability in higher education in the U.S. and Canada. Our mission is to promote sustainability in all sectors of higher education - from governance and operations to curriculum and outreach - through education, communication, research and professional development. Businesses, NGO's, and government agencies can participate as AASHE partner members.
The Biomimicry Institute (www.biomimicryinstitute.org) is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to naturalize biomimicry in the culture by promoting the transfer of ideas, designs, and strategies from biology to sustainable human systems design.
Teaching Bioneers
Teaching Bioneers
We encourage you to use Bioneers material in your own classrooms. But don't stop there! Make your work ripple out into the wider community by sharing your Bioneers lesson plans, curricula and discussion guides with other interested educators at Bioneers.org.
We would love to hear about your plans and activities – what have you used, how has it worked? Are there particular DVD's, book chapters or radio episodes that have lit up your students eyes? With your help, the ideas and principles embedded within the Bioneers Conference can begin to enter classrooms and education around the country and beyond.
There are several ways to share ideas, lesson plans, discussion guides or curricula.
- You can e-mail them to education(at)bioneers.org and we'll post them for you.
- Upload, share and discuss anything education related in our Bioneers Educator Community at connect.bioneers.org. Join up!
- You can post them on this page by adding a comment at the bottom.
Sample Lesson Plans & Curricula
Over the years numerous K-12 and collegiate educators have utilized the Bioneers Conference and the books, DVD's and recordings that emerge from each conference. Several generous educators have shared their curricula with us and allowed us to share it the Bioneers Community, with the hope that others will be spurred to create and share their own lesson plans and curricula.
Please be respectful in your use of these examples. Consider using these as inspiration, creating your own spin on the class and posting it online here to complete the circle. If you'd like to contact the instructor of any of these courses, please e-mail educator(at)bioneers.
Sample Courses featuring Bioneers Materials or Attendance at the Bioneers Conference
Sonoma State University - Holistic Social Change: The Bioneers Conference (Psychology 490)
Chico State University - The Bioneers Conference (Geog 199: Special Problems)
Utah State University - Bioneers Sustainability Conference (Environmental Studies 4950: Special Topics. Note - students attended the Utah Beaming Bioneers Conference)
Georgia Institute of Technology - Learning from the Bioneers (School of Biology and College of Architecture)
Discussion Guides
Every year at the Bioneers Conference brilliant thinkers and visionaries present insightful, educational and inspirational speeches on a wide range of topics. As part of our effort to extend these solutions beyond the conference we have created discussion guides to accompany two of our favorite speeches. These guides contain transcripts of speeches given at previous Bioneers Conferences, sets of discussion questions relating to key issues and concerns brought up within the speech and resource lists for further discovery and exploration of the various topics.
We invite you to create your own discussion guides to accompany the speeches and presentations given at Bioneers. Explore the library of Bioneers Presenations on DVD at the Bioneers Store. And don't forget to share them here!
Janine Benyus is the author of the groundbreaking book: "Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature." Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a new science that studies nature's best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems.
Van Jones is helping to lead a national fight for alternatives to the U.S. incarceration industry and has been a pioneer in challenging police abuse, as well as the over-incarceration of young people. He heads the Oakland-based Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which anchors multiple efforts to challenge the criminalization, incarceration and abuse of low-income people and people of color around the country.