Teaching Consensus and Community

Abstract

In the fall 1998 semester I had the opportunity to teach a course on American Communal Experiments. This course examined a variety of communal groups from the eighteenth century to present day, considering issues of power and leadership, gender roles, child rearing, economics, family structure and challenges to the group both from within and without. I wanted students to come away from the class with a sense of the myriad choices we make in life, and when those choices are clearly and consciously articulated, as in intentional communities, what sort of challenge that can present both to the individual and to society. To begin the process of getting students to think beyond the familiar, I introduced the decision making style known as consensus."...Consensus refers to agreement on some decision by all members of a group, rather than a majority or a select group of representatives" (Estes 1995:132). Consensus begins with the assumption that all members of a group are trustworthy and that each person has a valuable role to play in reaching a decision. In a consensus process, majorities and minorities are eliminated as diverging lines of thought are brought together. Consensus decision-making provides an alternative model to direct democratic voting, where the majority rules and some individuals remain unhappy.To teach consensus, I devised an exercise where a class of students, by way of consensus, would reach a decision. To make this exercise worthwhile to the students, the decision would be to determine the penalty imposed on late papers. I set one ground rule: there would be some penalty for late papers but I agreed to abide by whatever the class decided.On the first day of the semester I introduced students to intentional communities and explained that one of your first decisions as an intentional community is to decide how you will make decisions. I compared the decisionmaking styles of the Shakers and the Twin Oaks community to illustrate the variation found among communal groups. The Shakers, founded in 1774, organized themselves in a hierarchy of leaders and followers; the former made the decisions and the latter followed, rarely questioning decisions nor asking for input. Twin Oaks, founded in 1967, is an income-sharing, egalitarian, economically self-sufficient community in Louisa, Virginia. Twin Oaks uses a system of planners and managers (an idea from B.F. Skinner's novel Walden Two). The planners make long range policy, control and dispense resources, and the managers oversee specific areas of work or authority (such as food or transportation). Decisions are made at the managerial level usually after seeking input from others. Twin Oaks also employs a number of checks on power that permit questioning and revision of decisions.I assigned a short article outlining the consensus process (see Estes 1996) and explained to the students that during the next class meeting they would be making a decision by consensus. At the beginning of the next class I divided the students into three groups of 7 or 8 each. I ha...