Heather Hurst
Where Is Our Voice? Setting
a Democratic Foundation
for Adolescents in an
American Literature Course
W
I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers
of America, and along the shores of the
great lakes, and over the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!
For you, for you I am trilling these songs.
—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
hile working on my master’s degree,
I signed up for a summer course
that was vaguely titled Teaching
Strategies for Secondary School. As
it turned out, the professor had significant leeway
in deciding what to teach in this one-week course,
and he decided to team up with a political science
professor to focus on democracy in education. During
the first hour of class, they asked us six students to
define democracy. We stuttered through something
about “a government for the people, by the people,”
but when the professors prompted us to think more
deeply about the purposes of democracy and its necessary components, we sat in strained silence. How was
it that we adults, all of whom had been immersed in
this American democracy for the entirety of our lives,
struggled to come up with a workable definition of
that democracy? What does it say about a democracy
when its people are unable to articulate its definition?
This course was a critical moment in my
teaching as a high school En­glish teacher and led
me to begin rethinking the ways that I was teaching
American literature. I had always wanted my students to become critical thinkers who would know
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This article explores the
author’s experience in
creating a classroom that
embodies her newfound
definition of democracy.
how to apply what we learned in class to the world
beyond, and I tended toward critical pedagogy, but
I found in democracy a framework for explicit political discussion and means for action in regard to
the issues raised in critical pedagogy. Specifically,
I began to ponder how I could use this course to
help students to both better understand and better live democratic lives. My American literature
students and I had always looked at the seminal
political texts, such as the Declaration of Independence, that were featured in our anthology, but I
used them primarily to talk about rhetoric, parallelism, and whatnot. I certainly was not positioning the texts as living documents with importance
to my students’ daily lives. To reframe the course,
I began to think through the ways that democracy
was central to texts beyond those that were obviously political, and I wondered how to make my
pedagogy itself more democratic. Howard Gardner
suggests that we might instill American democratic
values in our classroom by adopting a “notion that
the school should be an idealized microcosm of the
larger society, complete with its conflicts and means
of resolution” (110). It was easy for me to think of
En­g lish Journal 103.2 (2013): 66–72
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democracy as utopic, as a system that honors and
incorporates the common person, but through my
summer course, I began to see democracy as messy:
to invite all voices means to invite conflict. Democratic pedagogy does not mean that we all come to
quick and easy consensus about our work together;
it instead means that we surface disagreements
and learn how to negotiate these. Gardner further
describes progressive education as “a system in
which individual differences and growth patterns
are respected, the curriculum grows out of community concerns, and democratic values are lived, not
merely studied. Students will be genuinely involved
in community activities and will seek to create and
sustain a school community that embodies democratic values” (225). I believed that democracy could
be not only a concept that we learned about but also
a concept that we lived—to some degree—in our
classroom. I’d heard fellow teachers proclaim, “This
isn’t a democracy; it’s a dictatorship” when the students protested a particular assignment or participatory structure. I was uncomfortable, though, with
the idea of holding absolute power in my classroom.
Instead, I cared deeply about the experience students were having in my classroom, and I believed
that they were learning ways of being in the world
through their experiences in school. Rather than
complacency, I wanted the literature I taught and
the pedagogical choices I made in teaching that literature to develop active questioners, even though I
realized that allowing significant space for student
sharing meant that I had to invite pushback against
my decisions, ideas, and interpretations.
Because I planned to sustain an inquiry into
democracy across the entirety of my course, I needed
to spend the first few days of the semester setting
up a framework, both for understanding democracy
and for instituting more democratic ways of being in
class together. Inquiry is itself a pedagogical choice
that invites democracy; it entails not merely asking
questions but instead is a collective stance that, as
Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan L. Lytle theorize, “is perspectival and conceptual—a worldview,
a critical habit of mind, a dynamic and fluid way
of knowing and being in the world” (120). Collaborative inquiry is a Deweyan democratic notion in
that it positions each student as knowledgeable, participatory, and intelligent. At the time, I was teaching American literature to college-prep and honors
eleventh-grade students in my aluminum box of a
modular classroom. Given our location in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania and our relatively
close proximity to New York City, my students came
from both rural and urban settings and were diverse
in race, ethnicity, experience, and class. Our school
had block scheduling, so I had my students for 90
minutes every day for half of the school year. To encourage and accommodate frequent small-group discussions and interactions, I had my students sitting
in table groups of four. I used this democratic foundation to begin each semester of American literature.
On the first day of the semester, I explained
to the students that we would be studying American literature, but before we could begin that study,
we needed to clarify what, exactly, American means.
Students then had 15 minutes to work with their
table groups to create a poster depicting “the United
States of America” and “American,” after which each
group presented its posters to the class. I displayed a
transparency with the following directions:
• Use images from magazines and drawings to
demonstrate items/values/qualities that your
group feels are distinctly American.
• Use words and phrases to list the most important characteristics of the United States.
The students then presented their posters to the class
and included quite an amalgam of adjectives and
nouns: super-sized; hardworking; entitled; hip-hop; personal space; apple pie; patriotic; consumers. While I designed this activity because I wanted to begin the
course with a discussion about the ideologies students have about their nation, I also wanted to use
it to establish a culture of interaction. I might simply have had students write individually and then
share their ideas as a class, but I believed that the
small-group activity would provide students with a
space to further their ideas beyond what they might
have thought of on their own—a tenet, I believe, of
democracy: that we are collectively stronger when
we work together and value every individual’s contribution. As John Dewey claimed, “[Democracy]
signifies the possession and continual use of certain
attitudes, forming personal character and determining desire and purpose in all the relations of life” (2).
After the students presented their posters, we
used half of the board to list the common characteristics of the United States displayed on the different
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Where Is Our Voice? Setting a Democratic Foundation for Adolescents in an American Literature Course
posters. If necessary, as was sometimes the case with
exhaustive lists, we pared down this list to the “essential” characteristics; I asked which elements, if
removed from the list, would alter our identity as
a country. We also brainstormed whether any other
features needed to be added. Specifically, if the students hadn’t mentioned democracy, I guided them
to add it to their list, and we would discuss why
democracy had or hadn’t made their list. While the
American democracy is neither the only democracy
nor the best model of one, democracy is central to
our nation’s identity and therefore provides important context and perspective into American literature. After class had ended, I copied the list onto a
large sheet of paper that I then hung on a wall of the
classroom; we referred to the list repeatedly throughout the semester as we continued our inquiry.
I then distributed a “Dwelling on Democracy” think sheet to each student with the following instructions and questions:
Answer the following questions as best as you are
able. Fear not; this will not be graded, although
we will be discussing the answers.
1. How would you define democracy?
2. Where or how have you learned that
definition of democracy?
3. What are the necessary components of a
democracy?
4. What is the purpose of democracy?
After students had reflected on these questions for
several minutes, we began to discuss each question.
The goal for this activity was to develop a working definition of democracy, which we drafted on
the available half of the board. As the discussion
continued, we revised and re-revised the definition.
I then displayed a quote on a transparency:
“Freedom is a partial, negative aspect of responsibility which is richer and more complete in meaning.
We may become free from the immediate and yet
remain irresponsible. We cannot become responsible, however, without also becoming free” (John
Wild, Existence and the World of Freedom, 154–55).
Across the different sections I was teaching, I found
that some classes had already included freedom
as part of their working definition of democracy,
but most others had overlooked the aspect of personal responsibility. To value each individual voice,
however, necessitates that each voice be shared, so
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I wanted to instill a sense of responsibility in my
students as a key aspect of their understandings of
self as democratic citizen. After a couple of students
had read the quote aloud to the class, we discussed
its meaning, particularly in terms of the connections between freedom and responsibility.
I then shared a short story called “Krontz
Faces Pollution Charges” from 50 Activities for Teaching Emotional Intelligence: Level 3—High School (Schilling and Palomares) with the students. This text is
a fictionalized vignette designed to challenge students to consider the various moral positions different stakeholders might hold in an ethical dilemma.
In this story, a factory owner is faced with near financial collapse after poor investments. Although
his factory employs several thousand local citizens,
it has begun to take heat from local residents and
the media for causing significant health problems
from pollution. The factory owner is then faced with
a dilemma: he cannot afford to update the factory
so that it does not produce as much pollution, but
if he closes, many people will lose their jobs and
their benefits. As I read the story to the students, I
asked them to pay attention to who is responsible to
whom and what the individuals should do to behave
responsibly. The story came with several questions
for discussion, such as “Should Mr. Krontz be free
to do whatever he wants?” After providing several
minutes for the students to read through and think
about these questions as individuals, I asked them to
discuss the questions with their peers at their table
groups. During the subsequent whole-class discussion, I also posed the following questions:
• Why is it important for people to understand
to whom they are responsible?
• When do we have a right to be responsible
solely to ourselves?
• What makes behavior responsible or
irresponsible?
• What role does responsibility play in
democracy?
• How much freedom should we have in a
democracy?
If needed, we revised our definition of democracy on
the board at this point in the lesson. This vignette
helped the students begin to imagine scenarios in
which we might enact democracy that are not ob-
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Heather Hurst
viously political. Additionally, as Cornel West
writes, “The roots of democracy are fundamentally
grounded in mutual respect, personal responsibility, and social accountability. Yet democracy is also
about giving each person a dignified voice in the
decision-making processes in those institutions that
guide and regulate their lives” (4); therefore, the discussion around this vignette helped students begin
to recognize how complicated democracy truly is
and how it requires that we negotiate perspectives
that will inevitably clash, as they do in the vignette.
I then asked the students, “If you had the opportunity to develop our classroom rules for the semester, what would they be? As a class, I’d like you
to create up to five.” It is not uncommon to ask students to participate in the process of creating classroom rules to set a democratic foundation; however,
what was important in this activity was not the end
result of a list of rules but instead the interactions
that occurred while students were developing the
rules. I remained silent as the students debated, revised, and selected the rules, but I took field notes
about the discussion that unfolded. A different discussion dynamic would emerge in each class, establishing a collaborative “way of being” with one
another; these ways, however, were sometimes less
than democratic. In some classes, for instance, a student might want to move the class quickly through
the activity and would thereby dominate the process. Another class might be more thoughtful, patient, and exceptionally deliberate in selecting the
rules. Despite the range of ways the students took
up this activity, each instance afforded us an inroad
for thinking about the ways we unconsciously enact
political actions that are more or less democratic.
After the students had “settled” on their rules, we
discussed the process they used in creating those
rules together using the following discussions:
• Had there been a leader or leaders in the discussion? How did that leader emerge, or how
was the leader chosen?
• What process did you use in creating these
rules? Brainstorming and then a vote? Majority/plurality?
• What were you thinking about when suggesting different rules? (With that question,
we discussed the concept of pursuing personal needs/desires versus advocating for the
common good.)
• How did you—or did you not—exercise
responsibility in selecting the rules?
• How does “voice” matter?
At the conclusion of the discussion, I explained
that we would see the concepts of democracy, freedom, and personal responsibility explored in various
ways throughout the literature we’d be reading during the semester. Additionally, I told the students at
this point that I was designing the classroom activities themselves to be democratic. Tony Knight and
Art Pearl write, “The challenge for democratic education is to maintain inclusiveness in the maelstrom of
controversy, developing the ground rules for debate
and through an equitable negotiating process establish the boundaries of permissible conduct. A crucial
lesson in democratic education is learning how to
disagree without being disagreeable” (199). We then
discussed any disagreements that had arisen during
the process of creating the rules and how we might
work with the Deweyan notion of using conflict to
learn from another and to reconsider our own points
of view, rather than as a forum for expressing our own
opinions without listening to one another. I had not
thought to introduce my students to Dewey, but if
I were to teach these lessons again in the future, I
think that a critical exploration of texts by key democratic philosophers would only be beneficial. I would
also consider bringing in the texts of contemporary
democratic thinkers, like Cornel West, and perhaps
even some anarchist literature for comparison.
Although these activities and discussions normally filled the entirety of the 90-minute class session, on the rare occasion that we had extra time at
A dvice for Establishing a
D emocratic Fou ndation
• Do first what you will ask of your students: wrestle
with your own definition of democracy. Attempt
Deweyan listening when in conflict with others.
• Plan for space for meta-discussion of classroom
practices and how they are more or less
democratic.
• Consider what might come from applying a democratic lens to the texts you teach.
• Cultivate comfort with the messiness of inviting
conflicting ideas and perspectives.
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Where Is Our Voice? Setting a Democratic Foundation for Adolescents in an American Literature Course
the end of the lesson, students made a chart showing how a text they read last year (including 1984,
Fahrenheit 451, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Animal
Farm, and A Separate Peace) reflects (or does not reflect) a democracy. Some students chose to explain
what would have to change in the story for it to reflect democracy. Alternately, I would also save this
activity for a day when I unexpectedly had a gap to
fill, such as a moment when I needed a last-minute
lesson plan for a substitute.
For homework that evening, I asked the students to freewrite a 250-word reaction to the classroom experience. I specified that I wanted them to
reflect on their role in the creation of the classroom
rules and to elaborate on what they felt a citizen’s
role in a democracy should be. This piece of writing, although informal, was then kept in each student’s writing portfolio and referred to throughout
the semester as we read American literature, and at
the end of the semester, students did a more formal writing assignment reflecting on whether their
opinion and view of democracy had changed after
reading the literature that has defined our country
and its exercise of democratic principles.
On the next day, we began class by discussing
the following questions:
• Is democracy a good thing? Why? Why does
our country strive to make the world “safe for
democracy”?
• How does “equality” fit with democracy?
How would you define equality?
• In what ways do you think the United States
currently functions as or falls short of functioning as a democratic society?
• How do you see democracy at work in our
school system (e.g., student government,
etc.)?
• To what extent do the media have a responsibility to support democracy? In what ways
could they support or degrade democracy?
In my first semester pursuing this inquiry with the
students, it was during this discussion that the students asked me, “Where is our voice?” It turned out
that this concept of democracy seemed distanced
from their adolescent experience. They might
someday participate in a democracy, but they didn’t
believe that they currently had a voice, and they
shared narrative after narrative of times when they’d
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tried to speak and been silenced. I was reminded of
how I myself had felt during my summer course:
I, too, sensed that I was a minimal participant in
democracy. I would vote in major elections but was
unlikely to participate in local politics. It was not
merely enough to reassure students that they do, as
adolescents, have a voice, and an important one. As
I have always worked from the belief that pedagogy
can be transformative, I realized that I needed to
help them know how to use their voices to enact
change. Often, we assume that student government
will fulfill this need for our students, but school is
only one context in which they live and operate,
and student governments provide only a venue for
limited change to school structures at best. Knight
and Pearl further problematize and challenge the
current student government model by arguing,
“Students learn to be responsible citizens by being
citizens in situations where they are able to exercise
ever increasing power and in situations where they
have very little power and use both to develop an
understanding of citizenship responsibility. In preparing for citizenship, students invent government
by establishing their classroom as a model government that, unlike current student government,
treats significant issues” (201). These beliefs led
me to design a classroom activity that would help
students begin to navigate situations in which they
felt they had little power.
For a couple of days after the “where is our
voice?” discussion, we did a somewhat impromptu
role-play activity. I decided that we should focus on
schools because they are political, as well as being a
context that everyone shared and with which everyone was intimately familiar (and about which everyone was usually opinionated). Additionally, public
schools are a site of local government to which the
students have easy access; while students might not
readily travel to legislative functions in their state
or the nation’s capital, they can attend their school’s
board meetings. To begin the role-play activity, the
students first free-wrote narratives of positive and
negative school experiences that they could imagine someone having, and then we compiled lists
of these narratives on the board. What makes the
positives positive and the negatives negative?
We then selected three of the negative experiences that students felt were most representative
of classrooms. I emphasized that the students were
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Heather Hurst
to develop composite, fictionalized scenarios; I did
not want to be in the uncomfortable position of inviting my students to complain about my professional colleagues. The students broke into groups
and then considered who might be involved in each
scenario—both the obvious players (teacher and
students) and the not-so-obvious (parents, administrators, teacher’s union representatives, etc.). I circulated among the groups and guided them to think
of the not-so-obvious participants, as students were
sometimes unaware of structures such as a teacher’s
union. Each group selected one of their scenarios
to enact, assigned roles, and researched those roles.
Because high school students are apt to think from
their own perspectives, the research helped them
consider the responsibilities their characters might
have. For instance, what concerns would a union
representative bring to his position? To whom does
a high school principal respond? Can each individual make decisions for herself, or must she consider
other perspectives? I believe this research furthers
democracy because it dissuades students from only
considering scenarios from their original positions
but instead encourages them to take up multiple
positions and perspectives, merging the diverse
voices that are fundamental to a democracy.
After their research, the students enacted two
scenes before the class—the “traditional” perspective,
or the way they thought that the scene would “normally” play out, and the “new” perspective, in which
those playing the students used their voice. After
each group finished, we discussed the scene as a class.
Were there better alternatives to the actions the students took? Sometimes, the students would act out
the scene a third time with some of these alternatives
to imagine the consequences—positive and negative—­of the actions they were taking in the scene.
For instance, one group wrote a scenario about
a fictional math teacher who gave a cursory explanation of a concept, assigned copious amounts of classwork, and then sat at her desk texting or playing
on her phone for the remainder of the class. In the
first enactment, students did not involve any outside individuals and instead role-played themselves
disengaging from the lesson and otherwise occupying themselves—sometimes by playing with their
own phones—or demonstrating their lack of respect
for the classroom teacher by interrupting her lesson,
whispering rude comments to each other, and arguing
with the teacher’s directions. In the second scenario,
the students nominated one student to broach their
concerns with the teacher outside of class time. The
teacher denied any problem with her instructional
methods. The students then acted out getting a parent involved to bring their concerns to the building
principal. Through this role-play, we were able to discuss the appropriate chain of command for handling
conflicts, as well as considering what the repercussions for the teacher might be. We also talked about
what we could do if this scenario represented a more
systemic issue in the school—if, for instance, the students felt that they were not being intellectually challenged in their classes. If following the appropriate
chain of command did not result in markedly better
education, we discussed how the students might appeal to the school board, including discussing practical issues such as how to get on the agenda to speak
at a school board meeting. Through these specific
discussions, students learned the socially appropriate
structures for voicing their concerns. Dewey writes,
“For what is the faith of democracy in the role of consultation, of conference, of persuasion, of discussion,
in formation of public opinion, which in the long
run is self-corrective, except faith in the capacity of
the intelligence of the common man to respond with
commonsense to the free play of facts and ideas which
are secured by effective guarantees of free inquiry, free
assembly and free communication?” (3). We also were
able to discuss local government structures, like the
school board, through which students are more likely
to be able to enact change than they might by, say,
tweeting the president.
The Whitman excerpt with which I began this
piece represents an example of how we might tie our
inquiry into democracy to specific pieces of literature that we read throughout the course. Although
this piece seems to celebrate democracy, it also offers
several challenges. For instance, how do we make
individual commitments to democracy? The poem
is written as a first-person narrative: “I will plant”
/ “I will make”; what does that service look like in
practice? We might also discuss the roles of companionship, love, and inseparability in a democracy.
Whitman’s poetry celebrates the common person,
encouraging us to consider the multiple participants
in democracy and how, throughout American history, marginalized and oppressed peoples haven’t always been invited to participate fully in democracy,
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Where Is Our Voice? Setting a Democratic Foundation for Adolescents in an American Literature Course
and it offers a forum for troubling the seemingly
utopic images we’re often presented of democracy.
These activities helped students view themselves as stakeholders in the political process of education. Their education became less of something
that happened to them but instead was something
in which they could be active participants. Michael J. Nakkula and Eric Toshalis argue, “When
adolescents implicitly ask what kind of person they
should be, who their friends ought to be, in what
or whom they should place trust, or what kind of
world they should make, the answers we construe
and imagine with them help co-construct who they
become and the way they approach the world” (3).
Imbuing our courses with democracy means that
our students learn not only about the worlds in
which they live but also how they can actively help
make these worlds better.
I taught my American literature course with
this foundation for several years until I left my
classroom to pursue full-time graduate work, and
although I used the same activities from semester
to semester, each class took up the inquiry into
democracy in different ways. Nearly 75 years ago,
Dewey warned that our lives are becoming increasingly complex, and we cannot allow our democracy
to stagnate, to remain as it was when our country
was established. Instead, he urges us to pursue a
creative democracy that each individual—not only
our politicians—must live out on a daily basis.
Fundamental to feeling like participants in a democracy is the understanding that democracy is
always an “unfinished project” (Knight and Pearl
203). If we believe that democracy has already been
figured out and that it can successfully be run by
other people, we will continue to feel like we lack
a voice, no matter how old we are. But Dewey emphasizes that a successful democracy requires daily
participation from all its citizens. Although I have
been removed from my classroom by several years,
if I were to return to teaching American literature, I would continue using this framing for the
course. However, my recent research has shown me
that high school En­glish students do not necessarily make connections between class discussions and
their lives outside of school (Hurst 117). Therefore,
I now think it is incumbent on teachers who take
this stance to help students make connections between democracy and the here-and-now, to live democracy creatively even at an age when they might
not believe they have a voice.
Works Cited
Cochran-Smith, Marilyn, and Susan L. Lytle. Inquiry as
Stance: Practitioner Research for the Next Generation.
New York: Teachers College, 2009. Print.
Dewey, John. “Creative Democracy: The Task before Us.”
John Dewey and the Promise of America. Columbus:
American Education, 1939. Print.
Gardner, Howard. The Disciplined Mind: Beyond Facts and
Standardized Tests, the K–12 Education That Every
Child Deserves. New York: Penguin, 1999. Print.
Hurst, Heather L. “Critical Knowing: Learning, Knowledge
and Experience in a High School En­
glish Critical
Pedagogy.” Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania,
2013. Print.
Knight, Tony, and Art Pearl. “Democratic Education and
Critical Pedagogy.” Urban Review 32.3 (2000): 197–
226. Print.
Nakkula, Michael J., and Eric Toshalis. Understanding
Youth: Adolescent Development for Educators. Cambridge: Harvard Education, 2006. Print.
Schilling, Dianne, and Susanna Palomares. 50 Activities for
Teaching Emotional Intelligence: Level 3, Grades 9–12
High School. Wellington: Innerchoice, 1999. Print.
West, Cornel. “The Moral Obligations of Living in a Democratic Society.” The Good Citizen. Ed. Linda Martin
Alcoff, David Batstone, and Robert N. Bellah. New
York: Routledge, 2001. 5–12. Print.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. 1855. New York: Signet,
2005. Print.
Wild, John. Existence and the World of Freedom. Englewood
Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963. Print.
Heather Hurst has recently received a PhD in Reading/Writing/Literacy from the University of Pennsylvania; her dissertation
explores how critical pedagogy in a high school En­glish class is experienced by adolescents in multiple and sometimes conflicting ways. Email: [email protected].
R E AD W R IT E T H IN K CO N N E C T IO N Lisa Storm Fink, RWT
Socratic seminars are named for their embodiment of Socrates’s belief in the power of asking questions, prizing
inquiry over information and discussion over debate. Socratic seminars acknowledge the highly social nature of
learning and align with the work of John Dewey, Lev Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, and Paulo Freire. Read more in
“Socratic Seminars,” a strategy guide from ReadWriteThink.org. http://www.readwritethink.org/professionaldevelopment/strategy-guides/socratic-seminars-30600.html
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