Practicing Democracy: Early American Authors in Twenty-First-Century Communities

In April 2003, I attended a Public Dialogue Series Action Forum in Fort Collins, Colorado. Organized through the Fort Collins Human Rights Office, it was the culminating event of a six-week series of small-group conversations about building community after 9/11. Some 150 community members—concerned citizens, elected officials, members of faith communities and social justice organizations, students from Colorado State University and Front Range Community College, Latinos and Anglos, evangelical Christians and Muslims, republicans and socialists, old folks and high school students—gathered in an auditorium at the Senior Center to plan the actions their weeks of talking across difference had brought them to. Individual participant's action commitments to themselves and their communities were flashing in a power point loop on an auditorium screen as people arrived for the session. But the evening wasn't about individual actions. It was about what we could do together.

I was there with a few students from my early American authors class. They had chosen this dialogue series as their service learning project for the semester. For weeks, we had been asking ourselves how Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography might speak to the young man in the dialogue series who suggested that public schools ought to "teach real honest history," not the "stories adults think are safe for young people." We had been exploring how citizen petitions in the twenty-first century might compare with eighteenth-century Black petitions for freedom. We had been putting into practice Thoreau's dictum from Walden that "[students] should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end" (94).

While these students were working in dialogue circles with diverse Fort Collins citizens, other students in this upper-division early American authors course were collecting life stories from residents in a nursing home, tutoring at-risk adolescents in a court-mandated residential school, developing the creative writing skills of middle-school students in a charter school with an experiential learning curriculum, and playing pinochle and pool at the Senior Center. As students gave their various community partners at least 15 hours of service, they were listening hard for the ways in which the individuals they encountered found their voices and built communities. Students kept journals, shared service stories in classroom groups and in larger discussions, wrote a reflection paper, and participated in a series of panel presentations to class members and community partners as part of the final event that replaced a final exam.

In the process, they enriched our discussions of community and voice in Bradstreet and Jefferson, Franklin and Thoreau, Stowe and Douglass, with insights and questions from their service learning experiences. They imagined a world in which there was no United States, and they grappled with the issues that brought a nation and a multitude of new communities into North America. They began to ask some of the same questions that American founding documents address, and they came to see why those questions are still the sites of such contention and importance. What stories do we Americans tell about ourselves and our origins? Who gets to tell community stories? With what consequences? How do citizens balance order and freedom? Who is a citizen, and what does a citizen do? How do we foster the arts? Who can access the full benefits of community? Who can't? How do we support meaningful family life? Who has power? For what? It's the usual heady stuff of early American studies in undergraduate curricula, with a twist. This time students were asked to engage the questions in their communities as well as in the classroom, in their world as well as in their minds. They were asked to supplement their reading and class discussions with field research. Taking a page from John Dewey and political scientist Benjamin Barber, they worked from the assumption that "the point where democracy and education intersect is the point we call community" (Barber 225).

I've been using a version of this service-learning assignment for several years, in...