Teaching Writing As A Democratic Practice
From Emily R. Johnston: A Call to Build Experiential Civic Learning into First–Year Writing Courses
When teachers teach writing as a way of thinking, students can see how knowledge is made. In such classrooms, students investigate how writers introduce new ideas, question claims, and revise positions. They come to recognize that knowledge is contestable. Through writing, they build a foundation for democratic deliberation.
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 For example, in reading across civic genres, from primary historical documents and documentaries to legal briefs and academic articles, we can trace how certain ideas about democracy become “common sense.”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.
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.
