As an educational platform, the Ralston project is perhaps most clearly understood in two seemingly contradictory descriptions: (1) as an interdisciplinary virtual “sandbox” and (2) as an exercise in participating in actual communities.
As an interdisciplinary “sandbox,” Ralston invites students to explore and create virtual spaces nonlinearly, guided by their own interests as virtual citizens. Along the way, they adopt varied perspectives on what communities are and how they function. Some of these perspectives open out of academic disciplines, such as environmental history, geography, economics, philosophy, rhetoric, and sociology. Other perspectives are framed by such concepts as social capital, contact zones, and “heart and soul” attributes (see the glossary of key concepts). Students’ contributions to Ralston can also take varied form, depending on their interests, knowledge, and skill sets: advocating for environmental causes, programming a local film festival, reading poetry at a Ralston cafe, organizing a protest….
The Ralston project becomes an exercise in participating in actual communities by asking students to do and make things in Ralston that are viable in light of the kinds of constraints that actual citizens of actual North American communities confront: laws, norms, environmental features, built features (e.g. buildings, roadways), and anything that was already there when they first entered the community. In some ways, the Ralston project’s overarching goal is disintermediation: using a digital media platform as a training experience—a simulation—in preparing for community involvement outside this intermediate community space.
THE PROJECT’S BROAD APPROACH TO STUDYING COMMUNITIES
The natural environment shapes…⏎
The built environment, which…⏎
Creates spaces where people encounter one another and behave in ways influenced by the space and …⏎
Where differences make negotiating the shared space a challenge and…⏎
Where a range of interventions, such as rhetoric, art, design, and policy, offer means of negotiating those differences.
ESTABLISHING A BASELINE FOR THE RALSTON PROJECT
Prior to engaging as citizens in the development of Ralston, students carry out analyses of their home communities or geographical communities of particular interest to them. These analyses establish analytical terms—a conceptual vocabulary—that they can then apply to their Ralston work and their emerging interdisciplinary understanding of the human community.
INQUIRY, OBSERVATION, INFERENCE
The project’s general approach uses observation and inference as modes of inquiry. Students spend some time literally looking out the windows of campus buildings, from which they can observe patterns in the settlement and development of Burlington. They carry out similar exercises in public gatherings, asking themselves what influence the construction of a space, such as the dining hall, has on the behaviors that take place within that space; what patterns of behavior predominate in that space; and what formal and informal mechanisms are in place to maintain order in that contact zone.
CRITICAL COLLABORATION
Making contributions to the virtual community of Ralston can’t be carried out in a vacuum, so to speak, with complete creative freedom. As articulated throughout the pages on this site, action in Ralston is governed by the conventions that govern activity in actual North American communities: laws, norms, environmental features, and so on. For this reason, students’ proposals for making Ralston a better community must take into account not merely what is formally allowed but also the needs and interests of other community members. In some instances, students will work in groups, much as citizens in actual communities do, to effect changes requiring collective effort. (Their orientation to group work will include this resource.) Even when working alone, however, students will be encouraged to see their efforts in the context of a wider community.
What’s more, students will see their efforts in the context of a longer history. Because each new group of Ralston student-citizens encounter Ralston as previous student-citizens left it, the newest arrivals are engaged in collaboration with previous students involved, much as one generation of citizens in actual communities extend the life of their communities by embracing, cultivating, and/or contesting its ways.
Ralston, Vermont's "Green Island" City 