As strategies for co-creation in teaching and learning, the democratic classroom and students-as-partners pedagogies seek to empower students by equally distributing the responsibilities of decision-making across the students and instructors in a class. In this essay, we describe and analyze how students in a second-year interdisciplinary seminar responded to and engaged with these pedagogies, as well as how they articulated perceived personal and intellectual change in connection with the approaches used. We suggest that participants created a course that embraces the principles of self-directed and communal learning, equipping students with skills and approaches for navigating not just their academic lives but also their lives beyond the walls of the classroom.