Teaching Democratic Practice in an Era of Democratic Decline

By Taylor Brown, School of Social Welfare

Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2026  

Social welfare policy is forged through democratic deliberation—through the messy, necessary work of disagreement, persuasion, and the building of consensus across differences. Yet our students arrive having come of age amid acute polarization and democratic backsliding, with few models for how substantive disagreement can coexist with mutual respect. I see my teaching as multi-purpose: I aim to train world-class social workers; to inspire my students to change the world and equip them with the tools to do so; and to prepare engaged citizens to help lead a healthy democracy. In SOCWEL 110: Social Welfare Policy (Fall 2025), I confronted this gap: students were expected to analyze and debate contested policy questions, but many lacked the skills—and the confidence—to engage across ideological lines without retreating into silence or hardening into antagonism. If social workers cannot deliberate democratically, the profession loses its capacity to advance justice through democratic institutions, so too may our society.

My response was an experiential learning approach that made democratic dialogue a core competency of the course. In lecture, students completed weekly readings, formed positions on controversial policy issues—welfare work requirements, school choice, universal basic income—and participated in structured small-group discussions and mock debates. But the critical pedagogical work happened in my discussion sections, where I built a scaffolded debating practice from the ground up. Early in the semester, I led a slow, modeled debate, walking students through the mechanics of arguing a position with rigor and compassion. I framed debate as a democratic practice: your opponent is your neighbor, a co-participant in the same political community, and persuasion requires understanding their position on its own terms. We built on this practice throughout the semester, each round deepening as students grew more comfortable with productive disagreement.

The final exam offered a culminating test of these principles. I created a collective study guide—a shared Google Doc with question prompts—and presented the class with an explicit choice at the heart of social welfare policy: study individually, prioritizing efficiency and self-interest, or organize collectively, dividing the work and preparing as a group, with the possibility of free riders. I reviewed the essential material in the section, but did not contribute to the document. The choice was deliberately framed as a microcosm of the dilemmas we had studied all semester: the tension between personal responsibility and collective solidarity, deliberated through debate.

I assessed effectiveness through behavioral and qualitative evidence. Many of the students chose solidarity: the Google Doc’s version history shows that over half the class—roughly thirty students—contributed to the collective study guide without any requirement or incentive, self-organizing around shared preparation. Engagement was steady across the preparation period rather than concentrated before the exam, and during section, I observed students working through the guide together in self-organized small groups, discussing questions and debating answers—unprompted, reproducing the very deliberative practice we had built all semester, learning that the academy—and society—is better off when we work together. This was an experiential learning exercise in collective action intentionally juxtaposed with our current political moment. In section, students consistently reported that the debate practice and final exam preparation were among the most valuable parts of the course, noting that it gave them both the skills and confidence to engage respectfully across disagreements. This suggests that when democratic deliberation is practiced—when students experience collective action rather than only reading about it—social welfare education can help form engaged democratic citizens who, I hope, can help heal our democracy.