An Experiment in Democratic Political Education

This ongoing experiment for undergraduates at Michigan State University and several community partners, including students in a small nearby elementary school in Okemos, Michigan, has been designed to put into practice a particular view of community service-learning or civic engagement which I call democratic political education. What distinguishes this experiment from other ways of teaching civic values and skills is the emphasis placed on the need to equip students as citizens with a capacity for recognizing and evaluating their political responsibilities for seemingly distant injustices and forms of violence. The project applies a concept of cultural re-enactment through memoir writing, web-writing, dramatization, and dialogical journaling to help college students and community partners come to terms with the clash between the demands of transitional justice and the obstacles posed to it by structural injustice and mass violence.