The New York Sophist

Circle-no-questions (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Why do I feel that coming to an event like this, ostensibly only about debating, do I find more people interested in my research and interested in my writing than I found among the professors in my field that I studied with in graduate school?

Why is it that “the choice” – that you have to either become a debate coach OR a scholar, seem so incredibly silly when I am at these events? 


Perhaps it’s because that NCA or field of rhetoric “old guard” who assume debate is for immature thinkers to gain maturity, or for students to be introduced to rhetorical or communication theory, but after that it really is for those malformed thinkers that could have been scholars, but failed/chose not too/couldn’t cut it, are not present, and would never be present at an event that centers around teenage students, high school students, or beginning undergraduates. If this is true, how do you persuade these reviewers that debate, as a practice, as a living thing, is just as valuable as the discourse of Mitt Romney for the study of rhetoric? Does pointing at how English Composition departments are ahead of us in this respect help?


Why is it so clear that there is a field-wide bias against debate in the scholarship of the field of rhetoric, mostly perpetuated by senior scholars who either practiced debate as an undergraduate, or perhaps couldn’t “cut it” as debaters, like the negativity I experienced toward debating as an undergraduate from particular scholars in my rhetoric department at that time?

Flipping the classroom is a popular idea in teaching right now. Could debate serve as a place which we can innovate, as it traditionally has in the field of rhetoric, by flipping the scholarship of the field in an analogous way? Imagine journals containing the narratives of experiential learning from debaters that are explored in the 50 minutes of your University class for connections or disruptions to theories that often take on no more reality for students than that of a spectral powerpoint slide?

How do you persuade scholars of argument that they have the best living laboratory in which to workshop ideas, test theories, and explore the limits of propositional argumentation as an idea every weekend at a campus near them?

Day one of the IDEA Youth Forum instructor training is over, and one thing stands out: There is no shortage of problems that you can come up with when you are talking about teaching debate.

Perhaps problem is the wrong word. Maybe challenge? But that sounds too much like business/boardroom speak. I like the idea of calling what we have problems, but I like it only in so far as we, as teachers, accept these things as our problems. We own these problems. These are our problems that could impede our ability to teach.

We did a fantastic exercise where we wrote down challenges that we face as debate teachers, and then redistributed them to groups to address the problems and come up with an activity that could be done that would work toward addressing the problem. Each group came up with fantastic stuff. A couple of the commonalities stuck out to me, because I face them in thinking about my own pedagogy.

1. Inclusivity: How do we address the reticent, quiet, or excluded student? It’s so easy for me to gravitate toward the student who is engaged, active, contributing, and not afraid to challenge my ideas or call me out. But the quiet and not so self-assured student needs equal attention. The group came up with fantastic leadership activities and other things to do to engage these students. The one common element was the idea of building community around the students. The thing I got out of it the most was the idea that each person watching a debate, no matter the skill level, is authorized to comment because they are an audience member – the most important viewpoint about the debate lies with them. I like the idea of audience as an automatic position of valuable speech post-debate practice.

2. Substantive Debate: There was great discussion on how to make argumentation more substantive, deep, and therefore more appealing to the listener. The idea of getting debaters out of their polished and practical style was a big part of this, and some interesting ideas were shared about it. For me, the take-away was (as it usually is) keeping debate in perspective, as a tool that helps us point out a lot of things to people practicing it about the nature of language, persuasion, and rhetoric in the world.

I also had a great conversation today with an argument theorist who teaches in a Spanish Speaking country, and in his introduction he mentioned both Chaim Perelman and Pragma-Dialectics. I think this was the first debate function I’ve been at when I was not the one who brought up those names. We had a good conversation, and I hope there’s a bit more to go. It’s rare to meet someone who wants to incorporate 20th century argumentation theory into the teaching of debate.

Everyone is working hard on curriculum, and it continues tomorrow. We have a lot of exciting things in store for attendees, and I know we are going to have some great instruction. Tomorrow we learn about judging Karl Popper debate, which I have not judged, so I look forward to learning the specifics.

Day one of the IDEA Youth Forum instructor training is over, and one thing stands out: There is no shortage of problems that you can come up with when you are talking about teaching debate.

Perhaps problem is the wrong word. Maybe challenge? But that sounds too much like business/boardroom speak. I like the idea of calling what we have problems, but I like it only in so far as we, as teachers, accept these things as our problems. We own these problems. These are our problems that could impede our ability to teach.

We did a fantastic exercise where we wrote down challenges that we face as debate teachers, and then redistributed them to groups to address the problems and come up with an activity that could be done that would work toward addressing the problem. Each group came up with fantastic stuff. A couple of the commonalities stuck out to me, because I face them in thinking about my own pedagogy.

1. Inclusivity: How do we address the reticent, quiet, or excluded student? It’s so easy for me to gravitate toward the student who is engaged, active, contributing, and not afraid to challenge my ideas or call me out. But the quiet and not so self-assured student needs equal attention. The group came up with fantastic leadership activities and other things to do to engage these students. The one common element was the idea of building community around the students. The thing I got out of it the most was the idea that each person watching a debate, no matter the skill level, is authorized to comment because they are an audience member – the most important viewpoint about the debate lies with them. I like the idea of audience as an automatic position of valuable speech post-debate practice.

2. Substantive Debate: There was great discussion on how to make argumentation more substantive, deep, and therefore more appealing to the listener. The idea of getting debaters out of their polished and practical style was a big part of this, and some interesting ideas were shared about it. For me, the take-away was (as it usually is) keeping debate in perspective, as a tool that helps us point out a lot of things to people practicing it about the nature of language, persuasion, and rhetoric in the world.

I also had a great conversation today with an argument theorist who teaches in a Spanish Speaking country, and in his introduction he mentioned both Chaim Perelman and Pragma-Dialectics. I think this was the first debate function I’ve been at when I was not the one who brought up those names. We had a good conversation, and I hope there’s a bit more to go. It’s rare to meet someone who wants to incorporate 20th century argumentation theory into the teaching of debate.

Everyone is working hard on curriculum, and it continues tomorrow. We have a lot of exciting things in store for attendees, and I know we are going to have some great instruction. Tomorrow we learn about judging Karl Popper debate, which I have not judged, so I look forward to learning the specifics.

(Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Now, after just having written about how I think debate videos are bad, let me explain why I think it is incredibly important to keep making them.

A couple of months ago, my external hard disk died very suddenly. I was really sad about it, because I knew I had lost some data I didn’t back up. I wasn’t exactly sure what was on that disk, but that’s what I get for not backing up regularly.

I didn’t throw it away, just kept it on a shelf and forgot about it.  The other day I plugged it in and it worked!

On this disk were a lot of debate videos. But not just rounds, videos of people between rounds, videos of conversations about debates, and other such material.  I started uploading it to the cloud right away as I wasn’t sure when this HDD would fail again.

The videos are pretty silly – lots of post round conversation, lots of practices and practice speeches, all kinds of debate rounds from various tournaments that, for whatever reason, I never got around to uploading. Looking at some of them made me realize that I’ve been here at St. John’s for longer than I concieve of it in my mind, and it made me a bit nostalgic for the early days.

However, this material is a lot more valuable than just that. These videos are our history. They are a set of practices and norms of communication. These videos are a record of those practices that we take for granted. In the future, they might be eye-opening for people interested in our communicative norms or our approach to debating.

We are lucky to be participating in global debate at a time when digital video is inexpensive and storage media are decreasing in cost. It’s time to start considering seriously the idea of a digital archive for debating.

The most frustrating thing that I have had to deal with in recent years was arriving at St. John’s University to reboot (using the term like they do in film) the debate program. The previous director retired, and left not one piece of paper or any type of information about the team anywhere.

This was frustrating because I knew what it meant: I was going to have to re-invent the wheel. I was going to have to chase down every dead end that he probably did. Audio video technology did not exist in the easy and cheap form it does for us, but what about some notes? Handwritten acccounts or reflections? Meeting minutes? History, if it is anything, are records of practices.

But more important than that is all the lost stories about the old team. In our Debate Facility which we call the Debate Dojo, there are numerous trophies extending back to the 1950s. They sit as silent witnesses to a team dynamic that may well be lost. It might seem hard to believe, but practitioners of debate in 20 or 30 years from now might really want to know what it was like to be at your IV, or be a member of your debate club. In a couple of hundred years, who knows what might interest those people. The videos we produce and preserve seem somewhat silly to us, but future practitioners will find them incredibly valuable.

I’m trying to recover those stories by starting a program of interviewing alumni and trying to get a sense of what it was like to be on the team during different eras. I try to shoot some candid conversation shots here and there to get a sense of what’s on peoples’ minds. I also, of course, shoot as many debates as I can. Even looking at some of these older debates gives me a sense of the trajectory of style in debating here in the Northeastern U.S. It might turn out to be an interesting catalog of the changes in persuasive style over the years.

At the University of Pittsburgh, where I received my Ph.D., there is a cabinet in a small room near the debate squad room. Years ago, a coach of the William Pitt Debating Union decided to record public debates on a reel to reel tape player. I found a player and tried to archive these recordings to mp3 in order to start a digital debate history project. Unfortunately, my time was limited and I was unable to see the project through.

In my view, it’s great that those tapes exist whether many people can listen to them or not. At least someone can listen to them and get a sense of what debate was like in the 1950s. I listened to several debates between Pitt and the University of Vermont – and they were nothing like any style of debate that currently exists. More than that, these recordings are amazing evidence of the practices of a different era. Listening to them and thinking about them provide an irreplaceable way to reflect on your own practices, to see what was valued and what we value now in debating.

I think it’s vital we create digital archives similar to this analog one that sits in Pittsburgh. Here at St. John’s we have a new graduate program in public history. These graduate students will be working with new methods for digital archive and information preservation. I hope to get them interested in my project and provide a nice resource for those interested in working on the history of debate practices. We might not think it matters, and we might even feel strange about making these recordings. But in 100 years some scholar will look at them and gasp – for she will have seen something that makes our era click for her in a way that allows a greater understanding of what we are up to for these people who we will never meet (but would love to).

(Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Now, after just having written about how I think debate videos are bad, let me explain why I think it is incredibly important to keep making them.

A couple of months ago, my external hard disk died very suddenly. I was really sad about it, because I knew I had lost some data I didn’t back up. I wasn’t exactly sure what was on that disk, but that’s what I get for not backing up regularly.

I didn’t throw it away, just kept it on a shelf and forgot about it.  The other day I plugged it in and it worked!

On this disk were a lot of debate videos. But not just rounds, videos of people between rounds, videos of conversations about debates, and other such material.  I started uploading it to the cloud right away as I wasn’t sure when this HDD would fail again.

The videos are pretty silly – lots of post round conversation, lots of practices and practice speeches, all kinds of debate rounds from various tournaments that, for whatever reason, I never got around to uploading. Looking at some of them made me realize that I’ve been here at St. John’s for longer than I concieve of it in my mind, and it made me a bit nostalgic for the early days.

However, this material is a lot more valuable than just that. These videos are our history. They are a set of practices and norms of communication. These videos are a record of those practices that we take for granted. In the future, they might be eye-opening for people interested in our communicative norms or our approach to debating.

We are lucky to be participating in global debate at a time when digital video is inexpensive and storage media are decreasing in cost. It’s time to start considering seriously the idea of a digital archive for debating.

The most frustrating thing that I have had to deal with in recent years was arriving at St. John’s University to reboot (using the term like they do in film) the debate program. The previous director retired, and left not one piece of paper or any type of information about the team anywhere.

This was frustrating because I knew what it meant: I was going to have to re-invent the wheel. I was going to have to chase down every dead end that he probably did. Audio video technology did not exist in the easy and cheap form it does for us, but what about some notes? Handwritten acccounts or reflections? Meeting minutes? History, if it is anything, are records of practices.

But more important than that is all the lost stories about the old team. In our Debate Facility which we call the Debate Dojo, there are numerous trophies extending back to the 1950s. They sit as silent witnesses to a team dynamic that may well be lost. It might seem hard to believe, but practitioners of debate in 20 or 30 years from now might really want to know what it was like to be at your IV, or be a member of your debate club. In a couple of hundred years, who knows what might interest those people. The videos we produce and preserve seem somewhat silly to us, but future practitioners will find them incredibly valuable.

I’m trying to recover those stories by starting a program of interviewing alumni and trying to get a sense of what it was like to be on the team during different eras. I try to shoot some candid conversation shots here and there to get a sense of what’s on peoples’ minds. I also, of course, shoot as many debates as I can. Even looking at some of these older debates gives me a sense of the trajectory of style in debating here in the Northeastern U.S. It might turn out to be an interesting catalog of the changes in persuasive style over the years.

At the University of Pittsburgh, where I received my Ph.D., there is a cabinet in a small room near the debate squad room. Years ago, a coach of the William Pitt Debating Union decided to record public debates on a reel to reel tape player. I found a player and tried to archive these recordings to mp3 in order to start a digital debate history project. Unfortunately, my time was limited and I was unable to see the project through.

In my view, it’s great that those tapes exist whether many people can listen to them or not. At least someone can listen to them and get a sense of what debate was like in the 1950s. I listened to several debates between Pitt and the University of Vermont – and they were nothing like any style of debate that currently exists. More than that, these recordings are amazing evidence of the practices of a different era. Listening to them and thinking about them provide an irreplaceable way to reflect on your own practices, to see what was valued and what we value now in debating.

I think it’s vital we create digital archives similar to this analog one that sits in Pittsburgh. Here at St. John’s we have a new graduate program in public history. These graduate students will be working with new methods for digital archive and information preservation. I hope to get them interested in my project and provide a nice resource for those interested in working on the history of debate practices. We might not think it matters, and we might even feel strange about making these recordings. But in 100 years some scholar will look at them and gasp – for she will have seen something that makes our era click for her in a way that allows a greater understanding of what we are up to for these people who we will never meet (but would love to).