Welcome
This is the home page for the fall 2017 COPLACDigital course Into the Woods.
Students in the course contributed to a project documenting some aspects of life in contemporary intentional communities — groups of people living communally and sustainably in accordance with explicit, shared values.
The students in each participating institution chose a nearby intentional community to study in depth, then built a website to profile the community they studied and explore how the community addressed paradigmatic issues and challenges in communal living.
As they learned about and discussed past and present experiments in communal living under the guidance of professors Debra Schleef (Sociology, University of Mary Washington) and Paul Schacht (English, SUNY Geneseo), they blogged here about their experience — of coming to understand intentional communities in general, of the particular communities they studied, and of learning how to archive and share the fruits of their research using digital tools.
To learn more about the project and access the students’ websites, visit the Into the Woods project website.