Michael Wierusz
Inglemoor High School, North Shore School District, Seattle, WA
To celebrate the Seattle Seahawks Superbowl win, Mike Wierusz’s students laser-etched a “12” on green Skittles in their sustainable engineering and design class. After that they planned capstone projects on everything from water purification in the Philippines to electronic paper.
Wierusz, a 2007 SOE graduate with a master of arts degree in teaching, is a teacher at Inglemoor High School in the Northshore School District, where he launched a Sustainability Engineering Design program as well as an International Baccalaureate design course. The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation has recently recognized Wierusz’s work by selecting him as an Allen Distinguished Educator, an award and fellowship program that celebrates and supports innovative teachers.
Wierusz says he’s designing the classes he wishes he had taken in high school. For Inglemoor juniors and seniors, that means real-world projects and hands-on learning in student-designed spaces, with access to industry experts for support and implementation of projects. These partners range from Chipotle to the Friends of the Cedar River Watershed, from Tesla Motors to Boeing.
It’s his goal, Wierusz says, “to increase the number of students who have access to life-changing experiences by spreading innovative thinking.” His most rewarding days are when students “realize that the space and time are theirs, not mine. And they start to figure out how to hack the system to get the most out of it.”
Soon they’re running barefoot on a bicycling trip or lasering numbers into Skittles. But integrated into Wierusz’s STEM courses is a strong emphasis on how innovation will impact the industry, the consumer, and the environment. Focusing on the roles and responsibilities of designers and the design process, students develop a three-pronged awareness of people, profit, and planet that will inform their future careers.
Wierusz has experience in the real world of engineering, providing solutions for first-world problems during stints at several engineering firms. He says traveling to Africa and Asia opened his eyes to a greater range of problems. Now he seeks to craft “an educational experience that provides an authentic window into the world of engineering through the lens of sustainable design.”
As a recipient of the ADE award, Wierusz will receive $25,000 and participate in a year-long cohort with fellow award winners, an opportunity that has already allowed him to network with teachers across the country doing “crazy amazing stuff.” He continues to draw on a passion for learning and integrated studies first discovered at SPU, where professors illuminated “the difference between a lifelong learner and a lifelong earner.”
He hopes to bring that “lifelong learner” mindset to the surface for his students through education experiences that cross disciplines and require a “hands-on, brain-on, heart-on” approach.
“If one day you were working on a project in my classroom that was the same project you were working on in art or business or history,” he says, “that would be pretty awesome.”