Engaging students as actors in rather than audience of their education. This is both the primary feature of experiential education as John Dewey envisioned it and its underlying link to education for democracy: the flourishing of democracy requires citizens who are empowered actors, and such citizens cannot be produced through educational processes that deny participation and power to students. In this article we share and examine examples of experiential learning practices that try to walk the talk of democratic purposes and discuss associated challenges and design principles. Our goals are to encourage and empower the community of experiential educators to understand, enact, inquire into, and continue developing the full potential of our work as it contributes to educating for democracy.