The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 36, No. 2 - 45

A Design for an Intentional Democratic Community

The Need for Human Development Methodology
Both students and staff now know it takes far more than people, a place, idealism, and good will to make a democratic community work, utopian or otherwise. It takes training, hard work, practice, perseverance, responsibility, and commitment to produce individuals and groups capable of successful self-government. Although democracy can be, and has been achieved through long and laborious trial-anderror processes, by use of human development methodology it is believed it can be achieved more fully and efficiently by direct experience within an intentional democratic community. As society moves into an era of planned communities it is urgent that education produce individuals who understand the underlying concepts of, and who have mastered the art of building a democratic community. This paper is a proposal for the design and development of an intentional democratic community (IDC). While intended for use in college residence halls, the design should have utility for other settings. Although based on years of working with groups and experimentation in residence halls, the design is the specific outgrowth of a 1972 experiment at the University of Connecticut in which teams of residence administrators, graduate students, and staff from thirteen institutions spent two weeks together in an attempt to create their own IDC. It was hypothesized this experiencebased learning situation would strengthen participant and team capacity to foster the establishment of IDC’s on their home campus. While it is a reflection of an evaluation of the experiment and reports by participants on

progress toward creating their own IDC’s, this article is less a description of what was done than was learned.

ELEMENTS OF AN INTENTIONAL DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITY
Four types of intentional communities can be identified: (1) content-centered communities, in which the focus is on a cognate or skill area (examples are living-learning programs, residential colleges where students and, often, faculty live to study specific subjects); (2) environment-centered communities, in which attempts are made to establish or alter the environment to make it conducive to the expression of intellectual, creative, artistic, ecological, or other interests of participants, depending upon the particular goal; (3) person-centered communities, in which the focus is on the individual, self-awareness, interpersonal relations, life-planning; and (4) group-centered communities, in which the focus is on building a group or community. This is the type of community under discussion in this article. Only the group-centered community is compelled by design to deal with governance. Many residential colleges or living-learning centers of type 1, 2, or 3 function in residence halls with conventional staffing. Depending on how comprehensive the design, group-centered communities, however, may also include features of any or all the other types. Of the many elements that comprise a human community identified by anthropologists, sociologists, and social psychologists the following have been found to be of particular significance in the development of the IDC in college residence halls.

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The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 36, No. 2

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 36, No. 2
