Category: reflection

Last Wednesday, Maureen and I delivered our final presentation of our website. We both felt pleased with the final site and our experiences throughout the semester.

At a point in the semester when I’m looking back on all of my classes (and paying the bill for the next set), I think it’s useful to reflect on what I’ve learned. While we have covered a great deal in this course, my two biggest takeaways are improved digital skills and new connections to LEF and its members.

This course was my capstone project for my digital studies minor. Through it, I learned how to participate in a course online through Zoom and Slack, strengthened my skills in website design and audio publishing, and learned how to use Google My Maps and TimelineJS. I’m particularly looking forward to exploring how Google My Maps can be useful for other projects and personal interests.

The other aspect of the project I feel most grateful for was the opportunity to visit LEF and meet its members. Maureen and I share a passion for sustainability, and it was eye-opening to meet a community of people who fully devote themselves to that ideal and manage to live fairly comfortably. Being involved with environmental activism in Virginia, it was refreshing and hopeful to learn about a different possible approach to the climate crisis.

What type of community do I want to study, and how? What have I learned so far?

Reading about various intentional communities in Virginia with Maureen has made me reflect a lot on what I value about the Virginia Student Environmental Coalition. Our coalition has a consciousness around creating a space that challenges the prevailing social norms of individualism and competition. Not just for fun and unity, this is a deeply challenging political endeavor. There’s a lot of pain and difficulty that comes with unlearning and relearning the way we relate to one another. Members must constantly strive for honesty, harmony, and self-improvement.

I think that in many ways, most if not all intentional communities are undertaking this sort of work. I would like to study a group that is conscious of the political nature of such a task and shapes their decisions and structure around it. Maureen and I also discussed possibly studying an urban group, since we are less familiar with how these might function. We definitely want to study a community that we can visit here in Virginia.

When we decide on a community to study, one thing I would like to look at is the group’s conflict resolution structure. This work seems really important in such constant group spaces, and I can probably learn a lot from how seasoned community members handle and process day-to-day conflict.