About the Curriculum for the Bioregion

Who We Are 

Supporting healthy communities and ensuring a sustainable future are some of the greatest challenges facing humanity. We urgently need community members and professionals who not only understand sustainability concepts and practices but are also motivated to use them in their individual lives, communities, and workplaces.

The post-secondary classroom is a key leverage point for creating understanding and action to work towards healthy communities and sustainable futures. Actively engaging post-secondary students with sustainability ideas, especially in the context of their local communities, can foster critical knowledge, skills, motivation, and leadership. To reach large numbers of students, the Curriculum for the Bioregion Initiative works with post-secondary faculty as well as leaders and experts throughout the bioregion to build sustainability concepts and place-based learning into a wide array of undergraduate courses. Launched as an initiative of the Washington Center in 2005, Curriculum for the Bioregion is entirely grant funded.

What We Offer 

Curriculum for the Bioregion offers support to faculty working to incorporate place-based sustainability learning into their curricula through faculty learning communities, a collection of curricula and classroom activities, and annual in-person gatherings and learning opportunities. Our resources and programing aims to support educators in engaging students with concepts of sustainability and real issues occurring in their bioregions and beyond.

What is a Bioregion 

Bioregions are, literally, “life places” – places characterized by the interrelated natural and social systems upon which we rely for our well-being. Our initiative involves colleges and universities in the Puget Sound bioregion and also the bioregion known as Cascadia. Situating learning in our bioregion connects students with the immediacy and significance of what is happening here, linking classroom theory to local places, people, and practices. In creating Curriculum for the Bioregion, we aim to prepare our students for a locally rooted citizenship that will ensure healthy ecosystems and healthy social communities.

About our approach 

Our approach to sustainability education springs from a set of Working Principles related to fostering student understanding and agency in the context of direct encounters with regional issues.

Our curriculum integration approach involves linking cornerstone concepts and skills in academic and professional disciplines with critically important sustainability learning outcomes.

The Curriculum for the Bioregion Steering Committee shapes and supports our work; they serve as leaders and ambassadors for our collective work related to sustainability, place-based learning, and civic engagement. Learn more about our approach here.

Contact Us

Kate Beck
Western Washington University
kate.beck@wwu.edu

Support for Curriculum for the Bioregion 

Curriculum for the Bioregion is an initiative of the Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education at The Evergreen State College. Created in 2004, it is entirely supported by grants and donations. These foundations and government agencies have been our major funders: The Russell Family Foundation provided crucial seed money for an 18-month planning phase for the entire initiative, and two significant grants to support our first five years of faculty- and curriculum development. (2005-09) A grant from U.S. EPA’s Environmental Education Grants Program supported faculty learning communities in the disciplines of chemistry and sociology and provided field learning experiences in Seattle and Tacoma focusing on environmental health and justice. (2007-08) The Norcliffe Foundation has supported Sound Learning Communities, a collaborative project with People For Puget Sound. Field-based summer institutes in different regions of Puget Sound involve faculty in the issues facing their part of the Sound and its associated watersheds. (2009-2013) Greater Tacoma Community Foundation supported resource experts for our Tacoma-based Sound Learning Communities summer institute in 2009, which focused on the Puyallup River watershed and Commencement Bay. (2009) Sustainable Path Foundation supported the Sound Learning Communities summer institute in 2012 focusing on northern Puget Sound/Salish Sea, and the Skagit River watershed. (2012-13) A congressionally directed grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education supported several faculty learning communities in western Washington; a series of regional workshops and conferences for college and university faculty across Washington State; and the publication of the Curriculum for the Bioregion Curriculum Collection on the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) website hosted by Carleton College. (2010-12)