Conceive-a-Community: A Group Exercise for Teaching the Theory and Practice of Communitarianism

I teach an upper division undergraduate sociology course called Community. It is an elective course open to students from all departments and disciplines; for many students this is their first (and possibly last) sociology course. Nearly 200 students are enrolled in the class which meets in one of the largest classrooms on campus. The course requirements include a group project which gets students actively involved in discussion when the large class size and poor classroom setting would otherwise inhibit it. The project gives students the opportunity to integrate material from a variety of sources, such as texts, lectures, and guest presentations, then apply this material in the process of completing a group term paper. Most importantly, the group project utilizes experiential methods for learning abstract theories and concepts, which in my course include symbolic interactionism, socialism, and communitarian anarchism. The course examines the efforts of rural countercultural communitarians in the Pacific Northwest to create intentional or utopian communities. The concept of community is presented as a symbolic social-interactional construction involving both structures (i.e., institutional and organizational behaviors) and sensibilities (i.e., ideological beliefs and social psyches). Thus we study the behaviors and beliefs of the countercultural back-to-the-land movement, currently referred to as the alternative culture's bioregional movement, as they have conceived and practiced community. Texts for the course include Jentri Anders's Beyond Counterculture: The Community of Mateel (1990); Andruss, et al.'s Home! A Bioregional Reader (1990); Bennett Berger's The Survival of a Counterculture: Ideological Work and Everyday Life among Rural Communards (1981); and Kirkpatrick Sale's Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision (1990). The class meets for three hours one night a week for the duration of a twelve week quarter. Each class is divided into three hourly segments, each addressing the same general topic of that evening (e.g., communitarian kinship). The first hour of class I provide a standard lecture on the assigned readings, but also I include data from my own fieldwork in the area. The second hour is spent with guest lecturers who are all members of local communi-