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.
