From Language to Voice: Three Strands of a Democratic Pedagogy
The following reflection was produced during a sabbatical year (2024-25). It is always a work in progress.
In every learning environment I’ve been part of as a teacher—whether in classrooms with multilingual learners or interdisciplinary content areas—one belief has remained constant: students are not empty vessels to be filled with information, but active participants in the construction of knowledge. To realize this belief in practice, I have developed three interwoven strands of pedagogical focus: academic language development, question formulation, and storytelling.
These strands are not separate techniques but mutually reinforcing practices that shape how I design instruction, support student thinking, and cultivate inclusive and participatory learning environments. Together, they form a foundation for democratic education—one in which students are equipped with the tools to access ideas, interrogate the world, and express their perspectives with clarity and power. They also support the dispositions of global citizenship: critical awareness, cross-cultural communication, and active engagement with complexity.
Each strand emerged from different experiences, yet over time they have converged into a coherent pedagogical stance. They have grown out of both practice and inquiry and they continue to evolve. The following describes each thread in some detail, while also raising broader questions: What kind of literacies matter in a democracy? How do we ensure that every student has not just access to content, but ownership over learning? And how can language, questions, and story function as tools for liberation rather than compliance?
I. Language as Lens: Why Academic Vocabulary Matters
Language and Disciplinary Identity
I first began to understand the centrality of academic language while teaching Human Geography and Spanish in an English-medium international school. Most of my students spoke English as an additional language, and I taught them through English—even though it wasn’t the language they used at home or with one another. At the same time, I was also teaching Spanish as a foreign language. Moving between these two roles gave me a unique vantage point on how language functions in schools—not just as a medium of instruction, but as a carrier of cognitive demand and disciplinary identity.
In Human Geography, I began to notice how much of what we were really doing was lexicon building: learning to speak the language of the discipline. Terms like demographic transition, urban hierarchy, or core-periphery model weren’t just vocabulary to be memorized—they were conceptual tools. Understanding them was key to understanding the field. The challenge wasn’t just about language proficiency—it was about access to the kinds of language that allowed students to think critically, weigh evidence, and participate in disciplinary literacy.
Teaching Spanish alongside this work sharpened the contrast. In a language classroom, we assume that students need explicit instruction, repeated modeling, and structured opportunities to practice. But in content-area classrooms, we often expect students to absorb academic English on their own. That assumption, I came to see, wasn’t just flawed—it was inequitable.
Recognizing this gap reshaped my instructional priorities and informed the way I approach both classroom teaching and leadership. Supporting academic language development is not an isolated concern—it is central to creating inclusive, intellectually rigorous, and equitable learning environments. It also demands that we consider the semantic load of our instruction and make intentional space for students to build conceptual architecture in every discipline.
From BICS to CALP: Understanding School Language
What happens when language itself becomes the gatekeeper to inquiry? How do we scaffold access to disciplinary discourse without diluting complexity?
One of the frameworks that helped me name what I was seeing in the classroom is Jim Cummins’ distinction between BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills) and CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency). Cummins argues that while conversational fluency in English may emerge within one to two years, the more complex academic language required to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate often takes five years or more to develop.
This distinction matters. It explains why students who seem fluent may still struggle with grade-level texts or abstract reasoning. CALP is not about fluency in the everyday sense—it’s about navigating the language of school: cause and effect, hypothesis, critique, generalization. It’s the difference between “I think it’s good” and “The evidence suggests this approach yields more sustainable outcomes.” Without access to this kind of language, students are not just linguistically at a disadvantage—they are cognitively underserved.
Robert Marzano’s work on academic vocabulary complements and deepens this perspective. His research emphasizes that vocabulary development is one of the strongest predictors of academic success, particularly in content-rich disciplines like science, history, and mathematics. More importantly, Marzano encourages educators to see vocabulary not as a list of words to memorize, but as a kind of conceptual architecture—language that gives students the scaffolding they need to build more complex understandings.
Conceptual Architecture and Vocabulary Instruction
This framing has influenced how I design instruction. I don’t teach terms in isolation. I introduce them in context, group them conceptually, and return to them repeatedly across genres and tasks. Students encounter words like analyze, evaluate, or justify as actions they must perform—not just definitions they must recall. Together, we unpack their meanings through discussion, modeling, and application.
For example, in a recent unit on climate change, students didn’t just learn the term mitigation. They used it to compare policy responses, critique global inequalities, and develop proposals of their own. Language wasn’t a barrier to understanding—it was the means through which understanding deepened.
Language as Equity and Empowerment
Ultimately, my goal is not just for students to use academic language, but to own it—to use it not only to meet expectations, but to articulate their ideas, frame questions, critique systems, and advocate for change. When students internalize language that once felt inaccessible, they don’t just pass tests—they expand their sense of what they can say, do, and become.
II. Questions That Move Us: The Role of Inquiry in Democratic Learning
Inquiry as Structure and Stance
In November 2019, I began my formal study of the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) through the Right Question Institute and the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). I had long believed that student voice and inquiry were central to meaningful learning, but the QFT offered something I hadn’t yet found: a clear, intentional structure to support all learners—regardless of age or background—in generating and improving their own questions. It was a framework that not only aligned with my values but gave me a concrete way to practice them in the classroom. What began as a deep interest quickly became an ongoing thread through my professional development and a defining lens for how I think about pedagogy, equity, and democratic education.
The QFT is more than just a structure for generating questions—it’s a powerful lever for shifting the culture of learning from compliance to inquiry, from answer-seeking to meaning-making. And over the years, as I’ve returned to the QFT through different programs and settings, I’ve come to see that question formulation is not a strategy I use—it’s a stance I take as an educator.
Geo-Inquiry and Global Citizenship
In spring 2022, I continued this journey through the National Geographic program Teaching Students to ASK Their Own Geo-Inquiry Questions. That course further expanded my lens. It pushed me to think about how student questions shape not just classroom discussions but real-world investigations. Framing and refining geo-inquiry questions gave students agency not only over their learning, but over the issues they choose to explore in their communities and across the globe. In this context, questions became tools of both understanding and action.
Most recently, in April 2025, I returned to the Right Question Institute and HGSE for Questions at the Core: Extending the Question Formulation Technique to Sustain an Inquiry-based Culture in Schools. This course took me beyond individual lessons and toward the systemic implications of question-driven learning. It challenged me to consider how the QFT could function not just as a classroom practice but as a shared cultural norm—across grade levels, content areas, and professional learning spaces. What would it mean for teachers, too, to center their own inquiry? What would it look like to build a school where questioning is not only taught, but expected, modeled, and protected?
Toward a Culture of Questioning
Across these experiences, my commitment has deepened to an idea that feels more urgent than ever: If we want to cultivate democratic learning communities, we must begin by ensuring that every learner—student and adult alike—has the skill, confidence, and opportunity to ask questions that matter. We cannot expect young people to participate meaningfully in the world if they’ve only been trained to answer. We must give them practice in framing problems, interrogating assumptions, and following their questions wherever they lead.
Rethinking the Purpose of Questions
What would it mean for questioning to be assessed not as a skill, but as a civic right?
In many schools, the default model treats students as consumers of information, preparing them to perform, comply, and compete. But in a world that needs more critical thinkers, collaborators, and change-makers, we need something different. Question formulation is one pathway toward that difference. It shifts the posture of learning from passive to active, from isolated to communal, from transactional to transformational.
The Question Formulation Technique reminds us that democracy begins with a question—and that education, at its best, prepares us not just to answer, but to ask.
III. Stories as Anchors: Making Meaning Through Narrative
While storytelling is frequently positioned as a means of enhancing student engagement, its deeper pedagogical role is often overlooked. In educational settings, story is too often treated as an “add-on”—a tool for capturing attention or enriching otherwise static content. Yet my experience as an educator, researcher, and creative practitioner has led me to understand storytelling as foundational to how learners make sense of the world. Narrative is not simply a way to convey information—it is a way of constructing meaning and a way of knowing.
This reorientation—from storytelling as method to storytelling as stance—has evolved over time, shaped by iterative engagement with pedagogical frameworks, public-facing media production, and training in creative nonfiction. Each of these domains has informed how I conceptualize narrative’s role in learning and in the development of student agency.
Story as a Mode of Meaning-Making
My work with National Geographic’s Storytelling for Impact professional learning series, including courses in audio, video, photography, and graphics, affirmed that storytelling is a multimodal literacy essential to contemporary communication. More importantly, these courses emphasized the narrative process as a way for learners to structure understanding, make disciplinary content personally relevant, and connect learning to action.
Storytelling, in this context, is not ancillary to instruction—it is instruction. A student constructing a photo essay on local environmental issues or producing a short video about a community tradition is not merely retelling facts; they are interpreting phenomena, exercising judgment, and crafting meaning through selection, emphasis, and voice.
In this way, storytelling aligns with disciplinary literacy. Each academic discipline has its own narrative logic—its own ways of defining evidence, sequencing ideas, and attributing significance. Teaching students to tell stories within and across these logics cultivates both content mastery and metacognitive awareness of how knowledge is constructed and communicated.
Narrative and Academic Language Development
As described above, one of my ongoing instructional commitments is to support students in developing academic language—particularly the specialized vocabulary that enables participation in scholarly discourse. What I have found is that storytelling provides an ideal context for lexicon-building. Narrative demands precision in language use, but it also situates that language in meaningful context. Students encounter and apply academic terms not in isolation, but as tools for articulating relationships, framing problems, and communicating findings.
The narrative frame also fosters productive struggle. When students work to express complex ideas through story, they must reconcile accuracy with accessibility. This tension—between fidelity to source material and clarity for an audience—supports deeper processing and encourages authentic uptake of disciplinary language.
Can a story be both personal and disciplinary—and how do we teach students to navigate that tension?
The Radio Essay as Public Pedagogy
From 2014–2020, I hosted and produced Geographical Imaginations: Radio Expeditions into the Geographies of Everything and Nothing, a monthly documentary-style program that explored questions of place, memory, and meaning. The radio essay form—part academic inquiry, part narrative nonfiction—became both a professional practice and an extension of my pedagogical commitments. In each episode, I aimed to model the kind of synthesis I ask of students: to integrate research, reflection, and storytelling in pursuit of understanding.
This work reinforced my belief that storytelling is not merely expressive, but investigative. It is a generative mode of inquiry, one that allows learners to connect personal experience with broader structures and systems. It is also inherently audience-aware. The public nature of storytelling—whether through podcast, performance, or publication—creates a heightened sense of responsibility and ownership that often eludes more traditional academic tasks.
Creative Nonfiction and the Pedagogy of Process
My training in nonfiction essay-writing has further deepened my orientation toward storytelling as process. In this genre, revision is not a mechanical exercise but a mode of discovery. The writer comes to know what they think by engaging in the iterative work of structure, language, and tone. This ethos carries into my teaching. I invite students to engage in drafting not as a step toward a polished product, but as an opportunity for recursive meaning-making.
What creative nonfiction also foregrounds is the complexity of truth-telling. Storytelling in the classroom—especially when it intersects with personal, historical, or political narratives—requires careful attention to ethics, representation, and positionality. Teaching storytelling, then, is not only about helping students communicate effectively; it is about helping them navigate the responsibilities that come with authorship.
Storytelling as Pedagogical Orientation
Ultimately, I understand storytelling not as a strategy to deploy, but as a pedagogical orientation grounded in constructivist and humanizing principles. It assumes that learners are meaning-makers, that knowledge is co-constructed, and that emotion, memory, and identity are integral to learning—not obstacles to be overcome.
In this sense, storytelling operates much like question formulation and academic language development. All three strands are rooted in agency. All prioritize the learner’s voice as central to the learning process. And all challenge traditional hierarchies of knowledge by inviting students to participate not only in the consumption of information, but in its construction and communication.
In a time when education is increasingly shaped by metrics and standardization, storytelling reasserts the human dimension of learning. It offers a space for complexity, for nuance, and for connection. And perhaps most importantly, it cultivates the kind of literacies—narrative, digital, civic—that students need not only to succeed in school, but to participate meaningfully in the world beyond it.
Conclusion: A Pedagogy of Participation
These three strands—academic language, question formulation, and storytelling—are not isolated strategies. Together, they form a coherent pedagogy rooted in participation, inclusion, and the belief that every student has the right to access, question, and contribute to the construction of knowledge.
Each strand reinforces and extends the others. Academic language empowers students to name and navigate disciplinary ideas. Question formulation builds the habits of inquiry and critical thinking that make that language actionable. Storytelling, in turn, provides a space to synthesize, personalize, and share those understandings with authenticity and purpose.
Together, they form a cycle of meaning-making: language provides the tools, questions provide the direction, and stories provide the voice. This cycle moves students beyond content mastery toward deeper civic and cultural participation.
As we seek to prepare learners not only for academic success but for engaged citizenship in a global society, we must ask: What kinds of classrooms cultivate democratic dispositions? What kinds of teaching practices help students see themselves as thinkers, questioners, and narrators of their own experience?
This is the work of democratic education: not simply preparing students to perform on assessments, but preparing them to participate in communities, critique systems, and engage with the world as thoughtful, informed, and ethical citizens. Global citizenship and democratic learning are not abstract goals; they are practices—habits of language, inquiry, and voice. And they are cultivated one conversation, one question, and one story at a time.