As a contemporary instantiation of Dewey’s notion of “trained capacities”, i.e. the building of social competencies in real life engagements with others, I offer the notion of propaedeutic rhetorical citizenship as a concept useful for theorizing important early stages of public engagement and for describing essential qualities in the Danish “Civic Desire” project. I focus on two particular “Civic Desire” formats as examples of how to pursue the Deweyian ambition of developing new ways for citizens to communicate in ways that support their personal growth as social beings and partakers of democratic community building.