The Living-Learning Community

Joining us for ASI provides the opportunity to be part of a unified living and learning experience. Themes of sustainability and food systems permeate every part of this program: from your interactions with peers and professors, to the housing, to the courses, to the field trips, to farm work, to communal meals, to the culture of the place. This thing is all-inclusive, all rolled into one - a true living-learning community!

Living and Learning at its best

Living-Learning Community Best Practice Model (Inkelas, Jessup-Anger, Benjamin, and Wawrzynski, 2018)

Leading experts in the field of learning communities developed the above model to demonstrate the essential pieces of an effective living-learning community. We are proud to note that you'll find strong elements of each pyramid "block" in the ASI program!

Students live together as a cohort in LEED Platinum-rated cottages.
They are in all five courses together.
Weekly check-ins are provided by faculty to ensure academic and personal success.
The students live in community with peer farm workers and researchers, and weekly Community Meetings are held to facilitate social health.
Students engage in meaningful projects - some guided by their own interests, and some in collaboration with our education team to serve local schoolchildren.
Weekly field trips expose students to food system professionals where we discover real-world examples of food issues, as well as possible career paths.
Life together affords multiple daily opportunities to learn from each other - inside and outside of class time, inside and outside of buildings.
The summer culminates in an integrative Farm to Table Feast, totally planned and executed by the students!

Coming Together at Rieth Village

Going from a cohort of strangers to a thriving, supportive group of friends in 10 weeks doesn't happen by accident! We take an intentional approach to bringing the community together and keeping it healthy. Here's how...

Community Formation

In the early days of each ASI program, special time and attention is given to getting to know each other. We engage in a handful of activities and discussions to help everyone understand each other - their needs, their preferences, their strengths, their pet peeves, etc. As we learn about the members of our community, we work together to craft our group norms. Those will help to determine the kind of culture that will emerge over the course of the summer. Think of it as team-building with greater depth.

We use the follow protocols from School Reform Initiative:

Community Meetings

At the beginning of each week in ASI, all the residents of Rieth Village come together for a pair of meetings. The purpose of these meetings is essentially two-fold: to encourage and practice good communication (student-to-student and student-to-faculty), and to work at developing leadership skills. One meeting focuses on the health and growth of the ASI students specifically, including an exploration of a leadership text. The other includes all the Rieth Village residents where we use the ANCHER agenda acronym:

Announcements (a look ahead at the week)
News (current events)
Community Issues (a time to voice needs)
Humor (funny things, sharing inside jokes)
Encouragement (affirmations of each other)
Reflection (a poem and closing thoughts)

Our leadership text is Kouzes and Posner's The Truth about Leadership, using this discussion guide.

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