Tag: into the woods

Reflection

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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.

Reflections: Our Community

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Our community for this course is unique in that it is decentralized from any one campus. We are able to maintain order through digital connection, so far mostly through Zoom calls, email, hypothes.is, and Slack. We meet on Mondays and Wednesdays for an hour and fifteen minutes and discuss progress on readings and our projects. This is the structure or framework within which it is possible to have a community.

In terms of feeling a sense of “community” within the group, group dynamics are important to consider. I still feel like I don’t really know the students from other campuses. I know their names but have not connected with them on a personal level. This would be true for “in-person” classmates in a large lecture class. As an English major, though, I’m used to discussion-based classes in which I get a strong sense of the personalities of classmates.

On the other hand, Maureen and I are close friends. We were roommates last semester. I feel a strong connection with her, and part of my motivation for the class comes from wanting to build a strong project with her. This is maybe what brings the strongest sense of community to the course for me.

I’m glad Dr. Schleef is physically present at UMW. Otherwise I think it would be easy to feel detached from the course. There’s a sense of accountability from having a UMW professor teaching the course, a knowledge that my performance and input will be remembered past the end of the semester. These are my reflections on our community so far.

-Sarah

Week 2 Reflection

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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.