 I might very likely have not been your civically engaged type if you were to look at my parentage, but I had certain early influences that I think helped foster that, including people like my scout masters and people like that, who actually just got me into the situation where I realized there was something I cared about, which happened to be in the first instance Ross Lake, the lake on the Skagit River that powers the Seattle Hydro Dam, and we had been canoeing up there a bunch. Then Seattle City Light was going to raise it to make more power, 110 feet, and it would flood things that I knew about, like Devils Creek Canyon and Skymo Falls and big cedars up Beaver Creek. And I was upset about that, but I had no idea that there was something I might do, but one of my high school band mates was aware of things and said, well, there's going to be a city council hearing. Why don't you go testify at it if you care so much about it? And she kind of supported the idea. And so I actually did, and found myself up in front of a big room full of adults, maybe a little high schooler, and read my statement, and that seemed like what that was at. But it got me involved and realizing that there's a whole process out there of people who are civically engaged, collective decisions are being made, Seattle City Lights of Public Utility. It wasn't what stopped the dam from being raised, but it no doubt had some kind of effect. So later on in my life, I found myself at UW. I thought I wanted to do something outdoors, so I went into the geology program there, and that was good. But while I was doing geology, I learned about this place called Huxley College up at Western. I learned about that from a climbing friend, and so I decided, well, better learn about that. It sounded interesting. And so I ended up transferring to Western, and the students were from all over the country, better than 40% of Huxley students at that time were from other parts of the country, and many of them brought a deep level of civic engagement. So we got actively involved in influencing environmental decisions and reading environmental impact statements and writing letters and all sorts of things like that. So then also one of my professors, Ruth Weiner, set up an internship for me in Washington D.C. So I went to Washington D.C. thinking maybe this would be the thing for me. Might as well check it out in the highest level. So I had a summer working with the legislative office there, and discovered that actually it was great, but it was not exactly my kind of work. It was not personal enough. After my experience in Washington D.C., I decided that maybe education was the way that I would feel more personally engaged with people and maybe have a longer lasting impact than the next election cycle and things like that. So that's some of what led me here. Another important influence on my civic engagement has been my experience of living in co-op housing with other students primarily. All those experiences of working together, both outside of class and I'd have to say in class too, as a student both undergraduate and graduate, I realized that other students were one of the best things to learn from. We would divide up the work and study it up on it together with each other the stuff we'd learn. My own understanding of our abilities to accomplish things together goes back to both this broad civic engagement but also the civic engagement that you have with a small group of people who are managing their own affairs, making decisions, having conflicts, working them out, having fun, eating together, working together and just building community. So I think I've brought those influences into my teaching in various ways. My impression is that I teach different classes fairly differently. It's quite likely my students think I'm probably pretty much the same wherever I am. But in any case, for example, I used to teach the large introductory GR class. It's a social science perspective on environmental studies and in that class I would have guest speakers come in. I would ask students to analyze persuasive messages on the side of an environmental issue that they agreed with and break down how they were being persuaded. So as much as possible try to connect what's being taught in the class to the outside world, to real people, real issues, real places. In other classes, I've approached bringing that civic engagement into the class in much more thorough going ways. I'll assign students in groups to research an issue and report back to the class on it. In the environmental education class I teach at the introductory level many of the students are from other disciplines and don't have a background in environmental issues and environmental science. So I get the students to teach each other through investigating the issues, reporting on the natural science factors as well as all the social positions of the different actors in the issue and then the different kinds of solutions that are proposed and then give their assessment of what they think should be done after they've looked at that thoroughly. So they're teaching each other about this stuff that I could just lecture them about, but they learn it much better if they have to learn it than I know they've got one that they've really studied and quite likely they've learned from each other too.