Teaching Bioneers

Your students, your classrooms, our future. Bioneers has the innovative ideas, materials, network and events to support all three.

Photo © Jan Mangan, Bioneers

We encourage you to use Bioneers material in your own classrooms. But don't stop there! Your feedback is fundamental to helping us ensure that we continue building the Bioneers Education Program to best support your needs. 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. Let us know by emailing us at

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 with the Bioneers Community in the hopes that others will be spurred to create and share their own lesson plans and curricula.

Sample Courses

Sonoma State University – Holistic Social Change: The Bioneers Conference (PDF) (Psychology 490)
Chico State University – The Bioneers Conference (PDF) (Geog 199: Special Problems)
Utah State University – Bioneers Sustainability Conference (PDF) (Environmental Studies 4950: Special Topics)
Georgia Institute of Technology – Learning from the Bioneers (PDF) (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 from previous years at the Bioneers Conference, discussion questions relating to key issues and concerns brought up within the speeches, 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 Presentations on DVD at the Bioneers Store.

Janine Benyus, Photo © Tim Porter, Bioneers

Janine Benyus: Biomimicry (PDF)Janine Benyus is a natural sciences writer, innovation consultant, and author of six books, including her 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: The Crossroads (PDF)Van Jones is a globally recognized, award-winning pioneer in human rights and the clean-energy economy. He is a co-founder of three successful non-profit organizations: the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Color of Change and Green For All.

"First, all education is environmental education. By what is included or excluded we teach students that they are part of or apart from the natural world. To teach economics, for example, without reference to the laws of thermodynamics or those of ecology is to teach a fundamentally important ecological lesson: that physics and ecology have nothing to do with the economy. That just happens to be dead wrong. The same is true throughout all of the curriculum."

- David Orr, Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics