In this article, the authors contend that high school English classes are a critical place for teaching democratic ways with words, and they call on and extend the tools of intercultural inquiry for the purposes of teaching democratic deliberation. The authors describe their collaborative engagement with an inventive data-driven genre--the "critical incident," a genre capable of calling people from different social, cultural, and economic positions into productive dialogue to discover and deliberate issues of shared concern. While the outcomes of deliberation are important, the authors focus on teaching an inventive genre, accessible to youth, capable of calling people with divergent interests to the table and, thus, constructing spaces of deliberation.