Apologies for the excessive amount of Tamika-posts

By Tamika Whitenack

Felíz viernes! I survived the first week of classes, yay. The only thing I’m going to talk about in this entry is the single class I had today, which is a half-credit 6-week course from the Education department called “Building Inclusive Communities”.

We met in the multi-purpose room of Davison house, which is the dorm next to mine. There were a lot more students than I was expecting, probably around 40? We sat cross-legged in a giant circle and then the two teachers/leaders started to explain what the class is about.

One of the teachers is the head of the Education department, and I really like her. She is an African-American woman and she is funny, honest, and thoughtful. The other teacher is not actually a Vassar professor, but an outside person who has been involved in a lot of intentional community building in New York, such as co-op type housing and such. He seems very much like what you might expect from someone who is involved with co-op type housing stuff (in a good way).

The goal of the class is to think about community and learn skills to create better communities, with the ideas of residential life and college in mind, but in broader communities, too. The five concepts that we will focus on are collective purpose, intimacy, power, conflict, and decision-making.

The class will consist of our Friday class meetings, as well as at least one meeting outside of class with our Small Learning Community (a group of around 5 students). In our SLC meetings, we will discuss what we have written in our journals. Our journal entries are responses to questions about community. Our other homework is all readings, which I think will be very interesting and which I can share if anyone would like (just text/email me! Also I might share them anyway if they’re powerful for me).

After explaining the general ideas of the course and going over the syllabus, we also went over community agreements. I’m relatively accustomed to this from some classes at EC, but I’m glad that we do it in most learning/talking spaces at Vassar, too. I think my favorite agreement is “Speak your truth with kindness”, partially because it sounds the most poetic, but also because I think it’s important and easy to lose kindness when we feel we are right, truthful, or justified.

To start to get to know one another, we spent the other parts of class sharing our names and the origin of our names, which is an exercise that I always really like. Partially, because I have an easy story for my name and like to talk about it, but also because names are such an interesting part of identity that can let you know a lot about someone’s culture, family, or just fun facts about them.

We also did concentric circles, which is another exercise that I really, really like. I think it is possibly the most effective get-to-know-you thing that I know of and I’ve enjoyed the times I’ve gotten to participate in it at Vassar. Basically, you form two circles, an outer and an inner and each person has a partner who they are facing. A question or task is then given and either the outer or inner (or sometimes both) person responds for a given amount of time. The circles rotate around so you get to talk to different people. Some of the interesting prompts from today’s class were: What material object is the most important to you? What are your 10 favorite foods? What are three things you enjoy that you do every day? Who can be in a community, and how many people are necessary to make a community?

The last part of class was spent in our Small Learning Communities, which were assigned based on a small slip of personal info that we filled out at the start of class. My group is me, plus 4 other students, and we seem pretty diverse although we are all freshman. I’m hoping we get to know each other pretty well over the course of the class. We did a check-in today at the end of class. This is a time where we each get a certain amount of time to talk, about anything we want basically. It is so that we can get to know each other better and so that we have a space to share and to learn the “humanity” of each other, as one of our teachers put it.

Even though today was a very introductory sort of class and I don’t we got to too much of the real content yet, I’m still very excited about this class! It is very different from any of my other classes and I think it will be a valuable experience and excellent for critical thinking. You will probably be hearing more about it soon J

In the meantime, I hope you all will think a little about your communities. It’s kind of nice.