Dr. Ede Warner
University of
Louisville
Dr. Jon
Bruschke
California
State University, Fullerton
I’ve told how
debating was a weekly event there, at the Norfolk prison colony. My reading had my mind like steam under
pressure. Some way, I had to start
telling the white man about himself to his face. I decided I could do this by putting my name down to debate…Once
my feet got wet, I was gone on debating. Whichever side of the selected subject was assigned to me, I’d
track down and study everything I could find on it. I’d put myself in my opponents’ place, and decide how I’d try to
win if I had the other side: I’d figure
a way to knock down all those points.”
--Malcolm X, Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1964
Education provides a microscopic paradigm case of broader
social inequalities in contemporary America; Kozol (1992) argued almost a
decade ago that urban educational settings lie under-funded and in desolation,
and seem especially poor when compared to the quality of pedagogy in private
and suburban spheres. One controversy,
deemed by some as the “civil rights debate of the nineties” revolves around the
issue of tax vouchers, with proponents arguing for increasing the ability of
poor students to attend private schools and opponents warning of renewed
segregation (Henry, 1999). As these and
other issues play themselves out, it is difficult to imagine an American with
racial equality so long as educational inequalities manifest themselves along
racial lines.
Improving urban education may require more than traditional
programs designed to raise test scores.
Urban youth are not so much underachievers as they are marginalized and
excluded from society. A current
assumption is that if urban youths could just absorb the content (what has
traditionally been called the “curriculum”) of their classes, they will have
the skills they need to thrive in society.
This paper takes a different view.
Marginalized students certainly need basic academic skills, but the
content of their education must focus always on enriching ways of including
students in society; it must emphasize ways to give students not just the tools
of the academy, but also the tools of empowerment.
It is doubtful that such an emphasis exists at present. Administrators in urban settings
increasingly focus on what is thought to be the “core” of an education (Wade,
1998). While sports still command a healthy
presence in urban educational institutions, many other “extra-curricular”
activities are lost in budgetary shuffles and the panic to improve the
basics. This essay will examine the
possibility of rekindling academic debate as a true solution to disempowerment
and academic defalcation in the inner cities.
The analysis proceeds in four stages.
First, empowerment is defined.
Second, a brief description of academic debate is offered along with a
discussion of its current status in secondary education. Third, the possibilities of debate as an
empowerment tool are discussed. The
challenges facing academic debate are considered in the final section.
A
DEFINITION OF EMPOWERMENT
Any
reviewer of the literature will have no trouble discerning the wisdom of
Jennings’ (1992) conclusion that “the term ‘empowerment’ has been used in
different, even contradictory ways” (p. 33).
For some, the community must be the unit of analysis for empowerment
discussions (Walters, 1999), for others it is the individual (Robinson, 1995),
and for some scholars the definition turns on a difference between access to
power and the attainment of power itself (Jennings, 1992). In this paper, empowerment will be defined
as a concept, its location will be identified, and its link to education will
be explored. Our purpose here is not to
break new theoretical ground in definitions of empowerment, but simply to
identify an acceptable definition and then explore the value of a particular
educational strategy in light of what can be understood as empowerment.
What
does empowerment mean? An understanding
of the term must begin in our contemporary social context. The postmodern situation is one where
individuals are more and more dependent upon institutions and bureaucracies,
and those bureaucracies have a tendency to insulate themselves from the
individuals that they are supposed to serve.
As the situation warps itself, the institutions become self-protective
and increasingly orient themselves to support the well off while increasingly
ignoring the needs of the under-served.
The institutions serve the privileged because only the privileged have
access to and influence in the institutions.
Thus, “one of the most debilitating results of modernization is a
feeling of powerlessness in the face of institutions controlled by those whom
we do not know and whose values we often do not share” (Galston, 1996, p.
164). Individuals and communities
become empowered when they possess “the capacity to change social relations and
the ownership, management, and distribution of wealth” (Jennings, 1992, p. 34)
in both public and private contexts.
Thus, at its most basic level, social policy should focus on “empowering
poor people to do the things that the more affluent can already do, aim at
spreading the power around a bit more – and to do so where it matters most, in
people’s control over their own lives” (Galston, 1996, p. 164).
We believe that empowerment occurs at both individual and
community levels, and that communities are empowered as the individuals in
those communities are empowered.
Professor Galston (1996) puts forth the view in a powerful way:
Empowerment
should be understood…as a multidimensional social possibility. Along one dimension, individuals can be
empowered to make personal choices that improve their lives -- choices that may
(but need not) require new or stronger associational bonds with others. Along another dimension, communities can be
empowered to act in ways that promote the common good as defined collectively
by their members. Empowerment, then, is
frequently, but not invariably, linked to mediating institutions; it may
sometimes be promoted and pursued by individuals through instruments other than
these institutions. (pp. 58-69)
Education has long been a key facet of empowerment. Galston (1996) has firmly located education
at the center of empowerment: “For many younger Americans, empowerment comes
through post-secondary education and advanced training” (p. 60). “Education” is not a static variable,
however, and there can be little doubt that the type of education one receives
(both its content and its means of transmission) makes a profound
difference. What are the
characteristics of an empowering education?
The possibilities are, of course, multifaceted, and to capture the
richness of the concepts we quote Ira Shor (1992) at some length here:
Empowering
education invites students to become skilled workers and thinking citizens who
are also change agents and social critics.
Giroux (1988) described this as educating students “to fight for a
quality of life in which all human beings benefit.” He went on to say, “Schools need to be defended, as an important
public service that educates students to be critical citizens who can think,
challenge, take risks, and believe that their actions will make a difference in
the larger society” (214). Further,
McLaren (1989) discussed the pedagogy as “the process which students learn to
critically appropriate knowledge existing outside their immediate experience in
order to broaden their understanding of themselves, the world, and the
possibilities for transforming the taken-for-granted assumptions about the way
that we live” (186). Banks (1991)
defined empowerment in terms of transforming self and society: “A curriculum
designed to empower students must be transformative in nature and help students
to develop the knowledge, skills, and values needed to become social critics
who can make reflective decisions in effective personal, social, political, and
economic action” (131). (pp. 16-17).
Beyond the curricular issues, the
manner in which education is conducted should be empowering. In contrast to the traditional, top-down,
and lecture-oriented model of educational communication, an empowering classroom
must see student growth as “an active, cooperative, and social process” (Shor,
1992, p. 15). Friere (1993) has taken a
similar view and criticized what he deems “narrative sickness” in our schools.
Broken down, this compendium of definitions include at least
three requirements for an empowering education. First, students must learn to engage knowledge in a critical
way. They must be able to listen
carefully to a point of view, examine its strong and weak points in a
dialectical way, and then choose for themselves their own beliefs about a
subject. They must “approach received
wisdom and the status quo with questions” (Shor, 1992, p. 17). Second, they must be social critics. Essentially, they must apply the same
dialectical stance toward the world they live in and the public policies they
are asked to live by and participate in enacting. Third, students must agents of change who are willing to take
risks, and believe that those actions can make a difference. Ostensibly, the more comfortable students
are in participating with the systems that produce change the more willing they
will be as risk takers and change agents.
Running through all themes is a critical approach, a dialectical
thinking process whereby students develop “habits of inquiry and critical
curiosity” (Shor, 1992, p. 15).
In
sum, empowerment is the ability to change one’s own life and one’s community,
empowerment occurs at both individual and community levels, and the most
crucial role education can play in relation to empowerment is teaching students
the skills of critical intellectual engagement. What remains is to discover how academic debate fits into this
scheme of empowerment.
Competitive academic debate is a broad field that includes
contests on many different sorts of topics (e.g., value or policy) in a variety
of formats. Although it is true that “argument is argument” and a full-service
debate program can offer a variety of debate formats to serve a variety of
student needs, this essay will focus on the unique research and critical
thinking emphasis of policy debate.
There are at least six characteristics of academic debate that are
relevant to empowerment: Debate is
based on student performance, and it is competitive, interscholastic, time
pressured, research intensive, and dialectical.
A brief description of policy debate may be useful for those
unfamiliar with its content and format.
Policy debate squads are composed of multiple two-person teams and each
school can field as many teams as they have resources to support. At the high school level, a national
organization, the National Forensics League, sets a topic for the entire
season. Each school takes its teams to
interscholastic tournaments, hosted by either high schools or colleges, and
contestants will usually compete in between three and eight preliminary
rounds. Teams are awarded wins and
losses and each speaker is assigned individual speaker points. Each round takes
roughly an hour and a half to complete.
At the conclusion of the preliminary rounds the tournament administrator
will either recognize the top teams and speakers in order or hold a
single-elimination run-off to determine an overall champion. Either way, the top teams and speakers at
the tournament receive trophies or awards. The topic is usually fairly broad
(past topics, for example, have included “Resolved: That the United States should significantly change its foreign
policy towards Russia”), and each team must debate both sides of the topic,
called the affirmative and negative. At
a four round tournament, for instance, each team would have two affirmative and
two negative rounds. When affirmative,
teams are free to choose from any case area under the broad topic. On the Russia topic, a team might choose to
focus on nuclear policy, immigration policy, military deterrence, or economic
policy. Those case areas might further
be refined to cases about NATO expansion, nuclear alert status, etc. When negative, teams must refute whichever
specific case area the affirmative chooses.
Obviously, being prepared to debate any possible case area under the
topic requires a staggering amount of research and preparation before the
tournament begins. A high school squad
typically competes in eight to twelve tournaments a year.
A first characteristic of competitive academic debate is
thus that it is student performance based.
During the course of the debate students respond to each other’s
speeches. An affirmative speaker
presents the case, a negative speaker will then conduct a cross-examination,
and the negative partner will refute the affirmative case. This basic sequence repeats through four
constructive speeches and four rebuttals.
Importantly, the students are responding to each other. The judge, usually a teacher or college
debater, observes the debate and provides feedback after the debate is over
either in the form of an oral critique or written comments on a ballot. Notice that the students are not learning by
taking notes and memorizing facts, they are “learning by doing.” During their debates students must be able
to make a solid presentation, defend their stance against objections and
contrary evidence, answer questions about their own claims and evidence, think
on their feet, and coordinate their strategies with their partner.
There are two powerful benefits to the performance-oriented
nature of debate. First, there is
strong reason to believe that students develop and grow much faster when they
are actually engaged in the subject they are supposed to be internalizing as
opposed to simply being exposed to the writing and lecturing of others (Friere,
1993). The learning cycle is complete
when students are taught how to do something and then get the chance to do it
for themselves. Second, the very nature
of the event empowers students by putting them in charge of their own
fates. Rather than relying strictly on
the authority figure of the teacher to direct the learning, the students are
depending on themselves and each other.
As Melissa Wade (1998) writes:
There
are certainly trends in education which encourage interactive and dialogic
pedagogies, but few are as potent as debate.
Teachers and students from many different schools from across the United
States learn from each other as positions are built and evaluated in the laboratory
of competition. A contest round
reverses the narration pattern of traditional education. The student speaks to the teacher,
referencing information that reflects an understanding of concrete knowledge
grounded in research. Through the
ballot or the oral critique the teacher reacts, refines ideas, and encourages
the student, but the basis of their meeting is student driven; the basis
uniquely relevant for student experiential education. In this way, students have an authentic learning experience, an
experience that does not treat them like an object to be “filled,” but as a
person with whom a teacher shares. (pp. 63-4)
Third, the skills developed in debate transfer to other
endeavors. Competitive academic debate
targets advanced skill development; competitors must master the basic reading,
writing, and research skills (the “Three R’s” of debate) and also develop
critical thinking, time management, and organizational skills. Brand assesses
the generalizability of these proficiencies:
Debate
promotes strong research and reasoning skills which go beyond most in-class
speaking or writing assignments. The
time and commitment of debate competitors manifests itself in skills which can
be successfully transferred to a variety of professional experiences. Once removed from the competitive debate
environment, debaters are more than capable of using effective delivery and
other communication skills. Evaluations
of debate based on the competitive environment do an injustice to the
excellence which the activity promotes.
These benefits need to be made evident to others in the discipline. (p.
263)
Debate participation also has the
potential to improve traditional grades and test scores. In a very direct way, many underachieving
students, once “gone on debating,” become better academic performers. In a more indirect way others choose to meet
the debate team’s academic eligibility requirements because they want to keep
participating on the squad. Of course, some students fail to improve
academically but our experience in over two decades of coaching is that at-risk
and underachieving students tend to fall into the first two categories if they
get excited about debate. Empirical
data on the subject is hard to come by, however, one recent meta-analysis
demonstrated that participation in debate is a powerful way to advance critical
thinking skills (Allen, Berkowitz, Hunt, & Louden, 1999). It is important to note that whether social
scientists can prove a relationship between traditional educational measures and
debate the point may be ancillary to an overall educational strategy. This paper seeks not simply to prove that
debate can improve traditional student performance, but that debate is the sort
of activity that can lead to student empowerment in a way that traditional
education fails to encourage. In other
words, academic debate has tremendous value quite apart from its ability to
improve achievement.
Secondly,
academic debate is competitive. Wins and
losses are awarded at the end of every debate.
The best teams at each tournament receive trophies, as do the top
speakers. Students are not competing
against an abstract measure for a grade; they are competing against each
other. The result is a much more
rigorous evaluation process. Instead of
relying on a single teacher to point out the strengths and weaknesses of each
argument, the students (motivated by a desire to win) point out the weaknesses
in each other’s arguments. Over the
course of a season of debating, virtually all weaknesses are exposed at some
point. The better teams, of course,
address those shortcomings and improve.
In all cases, the competition drives students to improve themselves and impress
the judges.
Put
bluntly, the competition makes debate frightening. It is well known that there is widespread fear of public
speaking, and academic debate takes the stakes up a notch. Not only are students asked to speak in
public, they must speak in public knowing that their positions will be attacked
and about half the time they will be handed a loss for their efforts. Much can be done to make debate less
intimidating (good judges will provide positive and negative feedback, and
tournament environments can be made encouraging), but successful competitors
will gain their success only by taking on great risks and overcoming great
challenges.
Third,
academic debate is interscholastic.
Although practice debates are held against other teams from a student’s
own school, tournaments almost always feature competition against other high
schools. The very nature of an
interscholastic activity is such that students are constantly meeting people
outside of their immediate social circle.
At large tournaments with a national draw debaters interact with other
students who live in distant states and have experiences far removed from the
other competitors. Students are exposed
to other campuses, including collegiate venues, and are often judged by college
students. Unlike athletic
interscholastic activities, where students might never converse with their
opponents, there is a large amount of “down time” before and after debates that
affords ample opportunity for informal conversation. These characteristics necessarily broaden the perspectives and
horizons of students. By meeting different
people from different cities, seeing different sights and campuses, the
students are exposed to a way of life different (if only by degree) from their
own. The benefits of contact with
college campuses and college-student judges cannot be overestimated; urban
students who may be the first in their families to attend college may not have
a social support network that encourages post-secondary education. Meeting people who go to college and seeing
campuses first hand is a powerful way to make college a less intimidating and
more attainable place to be.
Further, the interscholastic model accelerates learning in a
exponential way. Interscholastic debate differs from debate in the classroom
(sometimes referred to as “debate across the curriculum”). The difference between the two is analogous
to the difference between a regular gym class and a school’s basketball team
that competes against other schools.
The philosophy behind the gym class is that all students will benefit
from some exposure to physical fitness; in a similar vein, the idea behind
classroom debate is that all students will benefit from an exposure to the
basic precepts of argument and debate.
The philosophy behind the basketball team is that the very best athletes
will excel to vastly greater levels of development by competing against the
very best athletes of other schools.
Similarly, tournament debate offers the students most “gone on” academic
debating to sharpen and refine their skills to truly advanced degrees by
competing in tournament formats against the best speakers and debaters from
other institutions.
Fourth, academic debate is a time-pressured activity.
The critical thinking and strategic skills are learned in a fast-paced
environment. Every speech, the
cross-examination periods, and even the preparation time allotted for each team
during the debate is subject to strict and limits. Time allocation often
determines who wins and loses a debate, and the task is made all the more
difficult given the complex number of arguments advanced in a given round. Consequently, debaters must not only work at
understanding the arguments, but work at understanding which arguments are the
most important to the final decision. A
negative team may initiate ten arguments in their first speech (traditionally
eight or nine minutes), but since their rebuttal speeches are roughly half as
long competitors face decisions about which arguments are the more
crucial. Constant awareness of the
interrelationships between arguments is critical to success. Efficiency in word selection, language
variety, and rhetorical choice are premium skills. All in all, the highly-specialized technical aspects of debate
teach students not just to develop reasoning, speaking, and strategy skills,
but teaches these skills in a pressured environment. By its very nature, debate sets the highest possible expectation
for what students are capable of doing.
Fifth, academic debate is research intensive. Debaters must know what the best arguments
are against a particular position, and that understand must include knowing how
the opposition can answer the those arguments.
For example, a recent collegiate topic on Title VII of the 1964 Civil
Rights Act necessitated discussions of a wide range of issues, regarding
everything from pregnancy accommodation laws, to stronger protections for gays
and lesbians in the workplace, to consideration of the effect of Title VII on
minority businesses. On the high school Russia topic, an affirmative choosing
to discuss the de-alerting of our nuclear weapons could expect a varied
negative attack including diverse argumentation on the feasibility of the
proposal, the lack of a risk of nuclear launch given current institutional
structures, philosophical objections to any attempt make nuclear weapons “safer,”
the political unpopularity of the proposal, and the program’s cost. The research demands of academic debate,
coupled with the competitive nature of debate, can motivate a student with
little interest in research or education to research simply because they want
to do well in debate. In other words,
competition becomes a vehicle for motivating students to research.
Finally, at its core debate is a dialectical process. Originally, the dialectical process referred
to a question-and-answer format between students and teachers and was
juxtaposed with a lecturing method of teaching (Infante, Rancer, & Womack,
1990, p. 97). In more modern Hegelian
and Marxist terms, it has come to mean the offering of a thesis, the counter of
the thesis with an antithesis, and the continual refining of both the thesis
and antithesis into a synthesis. Most
recently, the term has been used to communicate relationships of constant
tension, nonlinearity, and process. The
term is used here to mean a type of thinking that recognizes both sides of
problem, resists absolutist conclusions, demands the thorough questioning of
any proposition, and recognizes the value of continually challenging both a
thesis and its opposite. At least one
theorist has argued that the dialectical process, thinking, and arguing, are
synonymous (Billig, 1987).
Such dialectical practices lie at the heart of an academic
debate. In the most general terms, the
topic provides the thesis and is supported by the affirmative. The negative must offer the antithesis, and
both teams defend their positions through a process of continual
challenging. At a more microscopic
level, each point either team offers is its own smaller thesis, and each point
needs to be supported by evidence. The
opposition will challenge the point with a contrary claim, an antithesis, and
offer evidence for that contrary proposition.
The remainder of the debate will be a process in which each team
challenges the other side’s theses and evidence, defends its own claim and its
own evidence, and may offer additional evidence to support its own point or
refute that of the opposition.
Cross-examination periods provide the chance for literal
question-and-answer formats. The fact
that debaters switch sides between rounds and defend both the affirmative and
the negative side of a topic ensures that they are exposed to all possible
points of view on a policy question. In
short, academic debate demands that students challenge propositions, debate
them from each side, and develop their discussions through the interrogation of
policy claims. Academic debate is not
an activity that simply facilitates dialectical thinking; debate is the
practice of dialectical thinking in its most pure form.
DEBATE
AS A TOOL OF EMPOWERMENT
Given
the criteria for an empowering education developed in the opening section of
this paper, three questions remain. How
does debate encourage students to think critically? How does debate teach students to be social critics? Finally, how does debate facilitate students
becoming agents of change?
Debate
teaches students to become critical thinkers because of its dialectical
nature. Students in the habit of
questioning the claims of others and thinking through the possible objections
to their own claims easily develop the mental faculties needed to become active
consumers of information. Rather than
simply taking knowledge offered to them at face value, students almost
automatically begin thinking through possible objections to any knowledge claim
and develop poignant questions about it.
Consider the recent controversies over whether evolutionism or
creationism should be taught in science classes. Some groups would have only creationism taught; some groups would
have only evolutionism taught. The most
enlightened compromise is, of course, to teach both possibilities and allow
students to choose their own answers.
Debate facilitates critical outcomes in all possible permutations of the
issue. If only one side of the dispute
is taught, debaters will automatically begin to question the point of view
advanced by the teacher by virtue of mental habit. If both sides of the issue are taught, debaters will have the
intellectual skills necessary to ask the most pointed questions and evaluate
the dispute in a mature, informed, and systematic way.
Academic
debate facilitates the development of students as social critics because of its
policy oriented and research intensive nature.
Although learning to think dialectically certainly might have some
transferable skill that would allow students to evaluate questions of
governance, no such transfer is even necessary. Students are directly debating questions of policy, and
evaluating the effectiveness, morality, and desirability of different governmental
actions and the possibility of non-governmental alternatives. Because all debates begin with an
affirmative indictment of the status quo, all policy debates invoke questions
of what the current social order is like and how it can be improved. Even when negative, students may offer “counter-plans”
that provide alternative policy arrangements or philosophical critiques that
ask the judge to “re-think” social orders and evaluate the affirmative plan in
that new light. The research intensive
nature of debate facilitates all these processes, and not only requires that
students develop a broad base of knowledge about particular policy questions
but also teaches them how to obtain knowledge on any policy question that they
encounter.
Debate
teaches students to become agents of change and risk takers because of its
competitive, time-pressured, and interscholastic nature. Because debate is competitive, it can be
terrifying. Students must engage in a
public speaking event, then face the challenges of their opponent, and then
immediately receive evaluation by a judge.
Students who can face and overcome those challenges and those fears are
seldom afraid of public dialogue in any other context, be it a political rally,
city board meeting, electoral campaign, legal proceeding, or town hall meeting. The time pressured nature of the activity
adds another element of challenge which, when mastered, makes other public
discourse seem mundane by comparison.
Finally, the interscholastic nature of debate makes students comfortable
in dialogues with others of different backgrounds. Although there is no single,
easy solution to the problem of confronting an institution controlled by
someone that “we do not know and whose values we often do not share,” debate at
least gives students the experience of competing against someone from a
different socioeconomic level.
Debate thus confronts at all levels the problems that the
under-served confront when approaching institutions so often governed by the
graduates of rich, private schools: The
under-served gain practice at policy discussions on equal footing with the
wealthy, skills of discourse are equalized, the experience can make economic
disadvantage less of a barrier when confronting other rhetors, and debate can
serve as a conduit for the economically under-served to gain positions of power
in institutions. The interaction
between students from all economic levels can increase understanding and common
ground, making it less likely that the governing bodies will represent a single
class and will misunderstand others due to a lack of contact. More basically, when students from urban
schools debate against elite high schools and win, the students learn that
victory is possible and that economic disadvantages can be overcome.
These
arguments are theoretical; they cannot speak as powerfully as the voices of
those who have experienced both the oppression of an education system failing
from the “unique synergy between lack of funding and anachronistic pedagogical
practices.” Ed Lee, who now holds a
Master’s degree and works for an Urban Debate League in San Francisco, recounts
his experience as an urban debater:
Educated in
the public school system of inner-city Atlanta, my high school experience was
tragically similar to the one depicted above.
My savior, like many others, was the Atlanta Urban Debate League. It provided the opportunity to question the
nefarious rites of passage (prison, drugs, and drinking) that seem to be
uniquely debilitating to individuals in the poor urban communities. In enclaves of poverty, there is also an
undercurrent of nihilism and negativity that eats away at the soul of the
community. Adults are hopeless. Children follow their lead and become
hopeless. The solution is to offer
people a choice beyond minimum wage or prison.
Urban Debate Leagues provide that.
Debating delivers a galaxy of alternatives and opportunity for those who
are only offered hopelessness and were unnecessary elements of our culture that
existed becaused they (predominantly) go unquestioned. Questioning the very nature of our existence
is at the heart of the debate process.
I am left wondering what would occur if debate became as compulsory in
inner-city educational culture as football and basketball? Imagine graduating from high school each
year millions of underprivileged teenagers with the ability to articulate their
needs, the needs of others, and the ability to offer solutions. I am convinced that someone would be forced
to listen.
Urban debate
Leagues offer a pedagogical tool that simultaneously opens the mind to
alternatives and empowers students to take control of their lives. Half of the time, students are disseminating
information and forming arguments about complex philosophical and political
issues. In the other half, they answer
the arguments of others.
Self-reflexivity is an inherent part of the activity. Debating gives students the ability to
articulate the partiality of all critical assessments. Contemporary educational techniques teach
one side of the issue and universalize it as the only “truth.” Debate forces students to evaluate both
sides, and determine their independent contextualized truth. Additionally, unlike the current pedagogy,
debate allows everything to be questioned…The ability to question
subjectivities presented as the objective truth makes debate uniquely
empowering for individuals disenfranchised by the current system. It teaches students to interrogate their own
institutionalized neglect and the systemic unhindered oppression of others. It is one of the few venues we are able to
question authority. (pp. 95-6)
Given the possibilities an urban debate program presents, it
is worth examining the practical possibilities for a revitalization of urban
debate. One thing is clear: Urban debate is under-utilized at present.
Many urban debate programs died in the late sixties and early seventies as the
result of massive budget cuts. As tax
revenues diminished in educational coffers, debate programs, always treated as
just one of the “extracurricular” activities, got lost in efforts to stop the
institutional bleeding by “doing more with less.” While college debate is more vibrant, as early as 1975 major
college debate organizations were acknowledging the lack of diversity in
intercollegiate forensics. Little has
changed over the past twenty-five years; minority participation remains
exceptionally low at the two major national policy debate tournaments, the
Cross Examination Debate Association championship and the National Debate
Tournament (Hill, 1997; Stepp, 1997)
There
has been some discussion about the reasons that current academic debate fails
to include participants of all stripes.
Loge (1998) maintains that the perception of debate as a white activity
is one deterrent for black students.
Hill (1997) argues that cultural communication differences hurt efforts
at motivating African-American participation.
Cirlin (1997) contends that the style in academic debate turns people
off in general, and we need to consider sociological approaches to changing the
nature of the activity. Cirlin believes
that the rapid rate of delivery, the extreme emphasis on research, and the
technical nature of the “game” serve to destroy the rhetorical usefulness of
the event, he argues. However, Brand
(1997) argues that criticism over format acts to shield discussions about the
benefits of forensic participation. We
agree with Brand, and believe that one primary reason for the lack of minority
participation is that high schools remain segregated, and because race and
class lines overlap to a large extent the minority students attending
impoverished high schools often simply fail to have debate available to
them. At the very least, there is not a
conscious effort to encourage students, especially under-achieving students, to
participate in debate.
The
advent of new Urban Debate Leagues demonstrates that when debate opportunities
exist in under-served high schools students tend to flock to them. Two seminal programs that can provide a
model for success exist in Detroit and Atlanta. Detroit has the longest running contemporary urban debate policy
league. Created in 1984, the Detroit
Urban Debate League was initiated as part of a plan to expand opportunities for
the city’s “Gifted and Talented” (Ziegelmueller, 1998). In partnership with Wayne State University,
the Detroit Urban League (UDL) offered summer scholarships and a city league,
culminated in a city championship. The
program in Atlanta has been spearheaded by Emory University and has been
tremendously successful. Emory
partnered with the Soros Foundation’s Open Society Institute (OSI) early in
their efforts; based on the Emory experience, the OSI has expanded its debate
outreach programs and now sponsors Urban Debate Leagues in 10 different cities
(including Detroit). One such program
exists in New York, which was able to generate a fifteen team league in it’s
first year of existence. The program
was a success in every level: Traditionally at-risk students reported marked
improvements in school, the popularity of these debate programs grew in each
participating school, and some students received debate scholarships at
colleges and universities around the country.
This season, OSI expanded the program to an additional fifteen schools
and generated donations and sponsors which offered first year UDL students the
opportunity to continue instruction at summer camp. For example, the Universities of Iowa, Michigan, and Northwestern
all gave full scholarships to UDL students demonstrating financial need and
competitive success.
The
Director of OSI program, Beth Breger, speaks to the success of the program:
Since the
program’s inception, there has been significant networking and information
exchange among grantees, as well as potential partners interested in launching
similar programs elsewhere in the country.
These initiatives have made great strides in attracting other sponsors
and supporters, as programs in Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago, and New York already
have funds allocated by the participating schools. Universities have contributed extensive in-kind support, school
systems have begun to allocate funding from their budgets, and community and
corporate foundations have expressed interest in supporting these initiatives.”
(pp. 67-8)
William Baker, director of the New York
Urban Debate League, made this additional observation: “The students are
reporting grades, watching CNN, and learning, in some cases for the first time,
that knowledge is power and debate is the tool for exercising that power”
(1998, pp. 70-1).
In
short, academic debate has tremendous potential to empower urban students and
assist them in their development into active agents of change. Although urban debate is not currently
widespread, there are some very promising vanguard programs that have
demonstrated that urban debate on a national scale can be very successful. The efforts in Detroit and Atlanta and the
interest and support of the OSI have allowed several promising models of urban
debate to emerge. One can only wonder
at the tremendous transformative effect
programs and models could have if duplicated nationwide.
CHALLENGES
FACING URBAN DEBATE
No
significant educational reform effort is without pitfalls and potential
obstacles. Beyond the normal problems
of educational reform there are at least four particular challenges that a
nationwide urban debate project is likely to encounter. The first difficulty surrounds the resource
intensity of debate. Even before the
school year starts, students must attend summer institutes, similar to the
basketball and football camps that competitive athletes attend. The expensive, private institutes can cost
between $2,000 and $3,000 per student; even the streamlined OSI summer
institutes cost between $400 and $500 per student, excluding transportation
costs. During the year teachers must be
paid stipends, and buses, trophies, judges, and photocopies must all be paid
for. Well funded non-urban high schools
can spend as much as $100,000 a year for a nationally competitive program;
low-scale programs directed exclusively at local competition still cost between
$5,000 and $8,000.
Financial
burdens are not insurmountable, however.
One strategy is to tap external funding. The OSI provides $2 million a year for debate outreach and is
currently funding programs in many different areas. Part of the OSI strategy is to fund programs for 3 years; during
that time programs are expected to contact other funders and develop
self-sustaining financing. It is too early to tell how successful such programs
will be in developing external funding, but there have been enough successes to
demonstrate that sustaining external funding is at least a possibility. Working
independently of the OSI, the National Forensic League has received extensive
support from the Phillips 66 corporation.
Federal Title I money may be available for especially impoverished
schools. A second strategy is to work
to reduce the cost of participation in debate.
There are some creative ways to reduce the cost of summer institutes and
tournaments, including shortening the duration, reducing the amount of evidence
used, targeting students for extended institute stays, and other
strategies. In addition, some
organizations may be willing to donate food or transportation rather than
money, and those donations can reduce the cost of participation.
In
the end, if debate is to become widespread proponents of academic debate must
either find ways to reduce the costs of participation, develop funding sources
outside of district budgets, or convince administrators that debate programs
are worthy of expenditures. Of course,
these approaches are not mutually exclusive.
A good debate program costs money.
So do most things of value.
While other academic programs can also boost student achievement there
are very few programs that offer the potential to empower students as
powerfully as academic debate.
Districts and administrators interested in developing students to become
positive agents of change should seriously consider making debate a top funding
priority.
A
second challenge is to find instructors that relate well to the students. Although many of the current programs thrive
on college-high school partnerships, one inhibitor to instructional development
is that the composition of the inter-collegiate debate community (even in urban
institutions) does not always resemble the composition of the urban debate
students. Ziegelmueller (1998) warns
that college debate programs should not attempt to superimpose their value
systems on the high schools. The
importance of cultural awareness training and sensitivity training to the
success of a university-high school partnership can not be underscored
enough. Current experience suggests
that this challenge, when confronted directly, can be overcome.
A
third challenge concerns the integration of urban debate students into
predominantly white and suburban debate circuits. At present most urban debate leagues are structured so that there
is a limited urban debate circuit, attended predominantly by urban debate
students. Those urban schools might
occasionally compete at invitationals or suburban tournaments. As urban debate grows in popularity and
urban students gain more experience, however, traditionally urban and
traditionally suburban debate circles begin to mix. In the New York area, for example, only six non-urban schools
currently compete, and consequently these schools must travel tremendous
distances to find quality debate competition.
The New York Urban Debate League, however, now has roughly 35 competing
schools. Where elite schools have the
advantages of funding, experienced coaching, and a history of success, urban
debate schools dominate with sheer numbers.
When these two different groups come together cooperative interaction
between urban and suburban culture is not a given. What defines success,
decisions over judging and formats, and stylistic concerns -- including
language, dress, and even “appropriate behavior” -- are all cultural concerns
requiring negotiation. Diversity as a
code-word is thrown around and universally supported by all, but true
“integration” comes with many challenges.
By way of analogy, many Americans supported the overarching principles
of equality espoused in the Civil Rights Movement but had a more difficult time
accepting specific programs like busing and Affirmative Action that attempted
to redress inequality. Even a recent
New York Times study reveals that while whites embrace the ideal of equality,
often the means for attaining those ends are rejected (Bennett, 1998). Similarly, the transition to a truly
integrated debate world brings challenge and negotiation of contested space.
A final challenge concerns the nature of the leadership in
urban debate. The following account has
been written exclusively by the lead author of this article, one of the very
few African-American college debate coaches:
I
remember going to my hometown trying to spread the “gospel” about debate before
I received my Master’s degree and Ph.D.
I was virtually ignored by local administrators. Debate was perceived as a luxury for those
with resources, and not as something for struggling school systems that could
not afford books. I hope this paper
demonstrates the flaws of such thinking.
The OSI initiative has rekindled my desire to see African American administrators
grab hold of this opportunity. If Black
educators see competitive debate as “just an extracurricular” activity they are
missing the point. If they take the
time to visit a tournament in Chicago, or Atlanta or New York, and watch the
educational process as it truly works, and watch the motivational effect that
debate can have on students of all types, including the at-risk students, one
instantly becomes a “true believer.”
Educators, administrators and politicians are looking for that magic bullet
solution to stem the tide of hopelessness, despair, violence, and nihilism in
our inner-cities. Debate can be that
ammunition. If administrators view
debate instruction as integral to the core curriculum and not as a fringe
extra, and if administrators fund this project by finding outside sponsors and
offering institutional support, we can make a real difference. During my first summer at Emory when the New
York students arrived we had a panel discussion with several graduates of the
Atlanta UDL, and I realized that debate was more than a game. These students told passionate stories about
debate “saving their lives” and how debate was a “way out.” One can only hope that politicians and
educators hear these testimonies first hand.
Baker (1998) describes the Detroit and Atlanta UDL’s as the beginning of
a movement. But the question is now
whether African-Americans will allow a predominantly white group to engineer
this movement or whether they will recognize the need to be at the forefront of
the development of debate programs across the urban landscape. Black scholars should be leading this
movement.
These four challenges do present
real obstacles to national success but they are not the heads of a Hydra: As they are confronted and overcome, academic
debate will become a stronger, more positive force. As Wade (1998) concludes, “Tournament debate has offered profound
skills for many who have used them to achieve national leadership roles in
government, business, and education, among others. It is only fair that all have access to such a rich experiential
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