A First–Year Writing (FYW) course built around experiential civic learning helps students develop dispositions that support participation in democracy. It puts their learning to work beyond the classroom.

Writing is Thinking

When we write, we don’t just transcribe what’s in our minds; we discover it.

I see this happen in my classrooms. In a gen-ed writing course on gender and sexuality politics, a student fervently objected to the curriculum because it conflicted with their religious beliefs. I encouraged them to treat our course as an opportunity to explore their beliefs, not to change them. They stayed in the class, but remained skeptical.

After the semester ended, they emailed me to say that the course had helped them facilitate a heated conversation in their church youth group—one they would have otherwise felt unprepared to take on.

By writing through discomfort, the student discovered that disagreement didn’t threaten their beliefs. It challenged them to enter into dialogue. It strengthened belonging in their religious community.

Reckoning with individual convictions alongside the demands of the collective is at the core of democracy. When we use writing to help us think, we practice democracy.

Writing gives form to uncertainty. When we write, we can deliberate rather than preemptively resolve or bulldoze past tension. We set ourselves up to act from a place of agency.

We can strengthen that agency when we examine how writing shapes public perception across space and time. For example, in reading across civic genres, from primary historical documents and documentaries to legal briefs and academic articles, we can trace how certain ideas about democracy become “common sense.”

When my students read the Declaration of Independence alongside Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech and critical historiography on racial classification systems, they notice the contradiction baked into the founding ideals of the United States. They tease out how the “independence” deemed natural and inevitable in 1776 was enforced through a racialized, gendered system of human enslavement and colonial genocide. They realize how writing helped authorize the conditions for nationhood, but also for structural violence. They realize how their own writing can shape the status quo. They realize both the agency and accountability embedded in that possibility.

Writing is Inquiry Across Differences

To be sure, writing isn’t inherently democratic even when writers use it as a thinking tool. In writing Mein Kampf, Hitler crafted and disseminated his fascist, racist, antisemitic ideology, codifying a rationale for genocidal violence. Writing becomes democratic when it’s structured as inquiry across differences, in the service of accountability to the people affected by the outcomes of that inquiry.

FYW teachers can create the conditions for such accountability. They can frame arguments as evolving stories, not fixed positions. Class activities can explore the material consequences of building arguments—the people, communities, and values that writers must answer to. Students can use writing to understand where disagreement comes from and the ethical stakes of intervening.

In my FYW courses, students unpack the histories of AI, mental health, greenwashing, cancel culture, and other complex social issues. They work in small “Discussion Circles” in which each person researches a different perspective on a given issue. Together, they synthesize their research into a narrative about how the issue evolved. This synthesis culminates in each circle crafting an argument for a “next step” that accounts for disproportionate impacts.

Barack Obama described democracy as a “bold experiment” in self-governance. Similarly, writing can function as a thought experiment. While experimentation can lead to new insights, progress isn’t guaranteed. “The blank page is a razed patch of soil. So many possibilities for starts that could grow well or go wrong,” poet Camille Dungy warns in a 2024 Poets & Writers article. The same is true of policies passed in the name of democracy.

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Teaching Writing As A Process

A writing classroom cannot entirely neutralize risk. But treating writing as a process can help contain risk by mirroring the process of democratic deliberation: proposal, response, revision. My students workshop the next steps they produce in their circles with the whole class. These whole-class workshops aren’t about evaluating the work, but reverse engineering it. The class articulates how each circle’s next step seems to emerge from its synthesis. This process highlights where links are clear and gaps persist. In this way, students discover how their work is landing on readers and adjust accordingly. A functioning democracy operates on a similar kind of dialogic process—a continual calibration of intention and impact.

Regular, structured engagement in feedback and revision can increase students’ civic self-confidence, a trust in their ability to contribute to shared decision-making. It can expose students to new perspectives, motivate them to seek out different sources, challenge them to make their logic more transparent, and stretch their capacity to engage different audiences.

Why First-Year Writing?

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Any civic education program typically reflects a diagnosis, a core problem that the organizers seek to address. When I got into this business around 2000, which is also when Tisch College was founded, a prevalent diagnosis could be found in Robert Putnam’s bestselling book Bowling Alone.

In those days, many educators assumed that our political system—a constitutional democracy with a market economy—was stable and would be around for the whole of students’ lives. Meanwhile, the official policy was pretty narrow, with not that much room between the two Bushes and President Clinton. But participation in civil society had gradually declined. Therefore, many colleges, universities, nonprofits, coalitions, and a whole federal agency promoted community engagement, which took the form of service or service-learning and community partnerships. Many of us also worked on encouraging youth to vote, because they voted at much lower rates than other generations and were just embarking on their lives as full citizens.

As we will see, those efforts continue and have deepened and strengthened. In my opinion, unfortunately, the thesis of Bowling Alone still applies today. But now we are facing even graver problems in our civil society, and institutions are launching or expanding ambitious programs to address the current crises. I would classify many of the programs based on their main activities:

1. Community engagement and experiential learning through partnerships with organizations or groups in neighborhoods near a campus

2. Curricula for civic thought or civic studies, from around the globe and across historical periods, mainly offered in the classroom

3. Research and innovation for civil society and democracy, with students doing some of the innovation.

4. Discussion, discourse, and listening across ideological divides.

These flavors of civic education at the college level often reflect different diagnoses of the current situation.

For some today, the problem is polarization and an inability to talk productively across differences. That problem may relate to social media and now AI.

For some, the problem is ideological homogeneity, which usually implies that the left is too dominant in academia.

For others, the problem is authoritarianism, or authoritarian populism, mostly (but perhaps not only) coming from the right.

For some, it is a failure to understand and appreciate the heritage of the US republic.

For some, it is the negative impact of social media and now artificial intelligence on the inner life. A public space is better when the participants develop rich and distinctive private thoughts.

For others, it is our inability to address grievous current social and environmental problems at a global scale.

And some would emphasize the dramatic loss of trust in a whole range of institutions, including schools, colleges, and universities.

Of course, an individual can endorse more than one of those diagnoses. For instance, I happen to believe most of them.

Differences in diagnosis explain some of the differences among the civic learning and engagement programs that are being formed or expanded today. These programs also differ in scope: some focus on the immediate surrounding community, while others aim to strengthen our republic or even global unity. Some turn their attention to the past, while others are working to change the present or the future.

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You might also ask what basic scene comes to mind when you envision civic education at the college level.

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So what does that mean for this year-long commemoration of the founding of our nation? What parallels can we draw from these yearly ceremonies that take place on college campuses throughout the country?

The ceremonies themselves do, in fact, commemorate. We celebrate the rewards of long nights of study, thoughtful dialogue about big ideas, and the internalization of complex procedures and formulas. Yet, as students cross the stage, a degree now in hand, a new season commences. Moving the tassel from the right to the left side of my cap was a symbol to those in attendance, and to myself, that a new chapter had begun.

In a similar way, I hope that 2026 does not simply serve as a commemoration of our nation’s 250th birthday. But, like commencement ceremonies imply, a new chapter for its citizens. Don’t get me wrong, I am just as excited to celebrate America250 as I was to throw my cap into the air, but I am also anxious for what is next.

2026 has the potential to usher in a new chapter filled with fresh insights and a rejuvenated sense of purpose for the preservation of our constitutional democracy. It can serve as an inflection point where we don’t just commemorate America250, but commence America250+.

There are a lot of ways that we can do this. America250+ is not confined to a particular course of action. It’s not defined by a particular field, region, or political persuasion. America250+ is a future-oriented mindset that sees commemoration as a pathway to commencement.

At our organization, Thinking Nation, we see our call to action as bettering the space we already occupy: history and social studies education. We want to leverage the study of the past in ways that can better our collective future. In order to do this, we think we need to re-evaluate our approach to history education in American classrooms. We want students to engage with history in a way that centers their own agency and empowers them as thinkers and doers. We are not satisfied with students leaving classrooms where the measure of their success is defined by the strength of their memory.

For our America250+ initiative, we are calling for a new minimum standard in history education, one where thinking is the minimum. We are striving to raise the floor for every classroom and what is expected of every student.

To do this, we’ve identified seven critical components of a history classroom where thinking is the minimum output for all students. To cultivate an engaged citizenry, we advocate for a history education that meets seven criteria:

These are not added benefits to a core subject area. These are the new minimum. By definition, history is a discipline that equips students to explore and answer historical questions. It must be inquiry-driven. The toolbelt to do this is historical thinking and robust literacy. When students engage in the study of the past this way, they are empowered to ask and answer robust questions, making classrooms student-centered and relevant. But this type of environment only produces systemic change when teachers are data-informed and collaborative. These components are critical if we want a history education to be the citizen-equipping field that it has the potential to be.

Classrooms marked by these attributes facilitate an atmosphere critical to civic thriving. Take Cabrillo Middle School in Ventura, CA—one of Thinking Nation’s partner schools.

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Our mission is to pull together conversations and streams of work from across the country and across many different types of institutions into a shared forum, to improve coordination, growth, and collaboration in the present renaissance of civic learning. We’re aiming primarily to support educators (including staff, teacher educators, parents, and others) because we believe that when educators learn more about effective approaches to civic learning, they’ll be more empowered to support their students in their particular contexts.

There’s no one right way to do civic education, but some ways are better than others when it comes to preparing learners to participate in a constitutional democracy. Civic learning in the United States ought to support free inquiry and civic agency rather than rote learning or obedience, and ought to emphasize a commitment to pluralism and constitutional government. Experiential learning is particularly impactful, as research has shown. We’re not promoting civic education as a good in itself, but as a means of building a healthy civic culture to sustain and renovate our constitutional democracy.

We’re living in a time of political polarization, and the field of civic learning — which, after all, inescapably includes learning about politics, government, and ideologies — is hotly contested by practitioners coming from different ideological standpoints. Civic education is also the subject of scrutiny and critique from outside political actors, some of whom espouse overtly anti-democratic, i.e. authoritarian, views.

It is our intention to share a broad spectrum of substantive, pro-democratic (note the small d) perspectives to represent our community of civic educators. Some posts may be controversial, but we hope that they will all be useful food for thought. And if you wish to offer an alternative viewpoint or counter-argument, we encourage you to do so with a collegial, thoughtful comment!

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At the end of the day, we as civic educators are all working toward a shared goal. We all benefit from supporting each other’s work, from helping colleagues to incorporate more civic learning into their work, and generally from sowing seeds to grow a healthier civic culture instead of building silos or gatekeeping.