The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 36, No. 2 - 65

Intentional Democratic Communities

can make more money. . . ) to a more communitarian approach to education as an investment in our collective future. Residence halls provide a laboratory for civic engagement. What is learned there can be transferred to any community. Residence halls provide opportunities for students to become involved in residential student government or simply to organize floor or community activities. These residential councils also provide students with a stepping stone to participation in wider campus governance organizations and to civic life after graduation. Transformative learning requires that people acquire new information and the ability to shift perspective at the same time. This is most likely to occur in a setting where people are, if not friends, at least familiars. Learning in a residential community almost guarantees that students will know each other in many settings and will develop common experiences. They will be able to engage in conversations about all kinds of learning in both structured and unstructured settings. They will be exposed to people who hold differing perspectives on a wide range of topics. Simply participating in a house council requires these skills if the council is to be an effective force in the community: Learned how to get things done by talking things out and cooperating with others—skills that have served me well in my career. (Brian French) I learned that making choices others disagreed with wouldn’t kill me. (A.P. Anaya) Living in a residence hall provokes learning by presenting challenges to pre-established student viewpoints, by giving students opportunities to solve problems and manage conflicts that occur in living communities,

and by offering opportunities to develop relationships with people whom they might never have met in the course of their pre-collegiate lives. Living in a residence hall with an intentionally designed curriculum that calls for learning new information, engaging in new experiences, and understanding multiple points of view provokes powerful learning. The IDC model is one approach to engaging students in a powerful learning experience and preparing them to become effective community members in their towns and neighborhoods and within their families and their civic and religious organizations.

CHANGING TIMES CALL FOR CHANGES IN THE MODEL
The original IDC did not incorporate one key element that became obvious as time went on. Creating a community is a powerful and timeconsuming activity for the residents, but it is not sufficient to keep the community coherent after a period of time, probably one academic year. The original IDC lacked an external focus. The first year all the energy went into creating the labor credit system for managing food and facilities, developing relationships and norms among residents, studying, and developing community rituals. In subsequent years, the working structure of the community was in place and took far less time to maintain. The community would have benefited from what we now call service-learning projects where they could have used the skills they developed in running their own community to provide service to external groups who could use their help and teach them more about the society in which we all live. The other element that requires updating is the technological aspect of
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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