Debating Ellis on Intelligence Squared

It's pretty rare that I take up the opportunity to debate these days, but a couple of weeks ago I was invited to participate in an Intelligence Squared debate on the merit of author Bret Easton Ellis of American Psycho fame. 
I think it went pretty well, and I'm somewhat surprised with how nice it turned out. Have a listen by clicking the link. You will need iTunes for the link to work.
I hope this isn't the first and the last IQ2 podcast in which I get to participate. I really enjoyed it!

Pointing at the Moon vs. Skillful Means in Debate Pedagogy (tags: debate, pedagogy, Zen)

There are two distinct and seemingly contradictory edicts in the pedagogy of Zen Buddhism.

The first is the idea of “pointing at the moon.” This comes from a koan that is quite well known in Buddhist literature. The koan goes like this:

The nun Wu Jincang asked the Sixth Patriach Huineng, “I have studied the Mahaparinirvana sutra for many years, yet there are many areas i do not quite understand. Please enlighten me.” The patriach responded, “I am illiterate. Please read out the characters to me and perhaps i will be able to explain the meaning.” Said the nun, “You cannot even recognize the characters. How are you able then to understand the meaning?” “Truth has nothing to do with words. Truth can be likened to the bright moon in the sky. Words, in this case, can be likened to a finger. The finger can point to the moon’s location. However, the finger is not the moon. To look at the moon, it is necessary to gaze beyond the finger, right?”

One interpretation of this is that direction from another is never enough for comprehension. It can be the first step in apprehension, or discovery. But after that one must take on the subject with directness, experience, and absoption.

Another approach: Talking about or listening to a discourse on a subject does not make one understand the subject. This is a much, much ignored idea in contemporary teaching, but not in contemporary pedagogy. Critical pedagogy tackles this issue head on, in my opinion, with the idea of praxis, or practice and theory blended or merged in such a way that they inform each other directly.

The finger pointing at the moon is an egotistical finger. It is so uncertain and unsure of itself that it often imagines that without its presence, nobody would even see the moon, much less recognize the incredible importance and value of the moon. The finger is a lot closer, and a lot more immediate than the moon, so the finger gets a lot of attention from the students. The students easily begin to slip into the easy believe that not only does the finger understand the moon implicitly, but the finger lives there, has lived there for many years, and often goes there. Some even say the finger is composed of moon-matter, and therefore attending to the finger is attending to the moon – they are of the same stuff.

This koan is a pedagogical warning: Do not equate the message with the messenger. You will fall into terrible associations and false practices. Nobody but you can assess and know the moon. There’s nothing between you and the moon. You do not need a finger to help you understand that. You might, at the beginning, be uncertain of where the light comes from at night. The instructor, master, or teacher can direct you, and sometimes needs to direct you with the finger. But only a fool allows their eyes to rest there. The moon is where it’s at.

Even the water apprehends the moon perfectly without assistance. It knows moon without intermediary. A drop of dew does the same. The trick is how much finger, and how to make sure students do not replace moon with your presence, or worse, think that the moon was transmitted to them via your finger.

Now, on to the second issue: Skillful Means.

I’ve been reading a ton of [Brad Warner’s] (http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com) books and writings recently, and I like his take on skillful means about as much as I like Thich Naht Hahn’s. Warner defines it as, “doing the absolute best with what you have,” in Sit Down and Shut Up.

Skillful Means for the teacher is nothing new. You learn how to beg, borrow, and steal ideas for your class. You sift through the garbage at your institution for any good matter with which to teach. You take extra handouts you find in other classrooms. You listen carefully to your colleagues in order to get new or maybe more effective classroom ideas from them. In short, you are always reaching out, taking in, evaluating and editing ideas for the classroom.

When teaching, Skillful Means are there. You are always assessing how each line is being processed, accepted, or rejected by your students. As Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, the teacher extends a staff and the student must grab hold of it with blind trust to cross the river. Skillful means are how to get students to grab onto something they can’t quite see yet.

So the contradiction I am working through is how to avoid seeing Skillful Means as a Pointing to the Moon for pedagogy. I think I have substituted extension of Skillful Means for the Moon in pedagogy, and I wonder if I am alone. It’s quite satisfying to think that you have done great things for students and you have only really extended to them a stick, not realization of what “crossing the river” means or could mean.

The only solution for this paradox (perhaps it’s not a contradiction after all) is perhaps to broaden one’s teaching past the point of teaching skills to teaching skills within a larger narrative or context. The idea that one only has to debate well to understand debate is ridiculous at best, and pretty dangerous at worst. Look to the closest analogue to contemporary debate training that we have – the martial arts – and you find a very tightly wedded concept of ethics and a nice moral philosophy grounded deeply within the skills taught and tied directly to the promotion system of martial arts. We only seem to have and promote skills and have little concern for the context in which these skills operate. You teach someone to high kick, but you do not examine the ethical responsibilities that come with such a skill?

I think that the danger is that skillful means are very satisfying. That “Oooh!” moment becomes addictive. The cult of personality that arises around the teacher who awakens many students is also addictive. One begins to believe one is the Moon – or the realization. The counters to this are quite difficult to imagine and employ.

All of this is in the service of religious enlightenment, so it might seem difficult or unwise to marshal it for the teaching of rhetoric and debate. But enlightenment in the Buddhist tradition is generally thought of as realization that this world is all there is. So I think it can be quite useful for getting students out of their own heads, their own egos, their own beliefs about the world and into the way the world is perceived by the multitude of others.

Focus on the realizations that we share and perhaps we can appreciate the skillful means of others within a context that associates us more with each other rather than a dissociative context where there are the “good debaters” and everyone else. Working toward realization is everyone’s lifelong duty, if this perspective is adopted.

This Blog Is Moving!

Hey everyone, I’ve decided to move this blog over to Posterous for a few reasons. Primarily, with the addition of a Blackberry to my life, I want to be able to post rich content almost immediately from different debate events, tournaments, and workshops I attend. Don’t worry, this site isn’t going anywhere, but you should update your links and bookmarks with the following new address:

http://progymnasmata.posterous.com

I’ve loved all your comments and suggestions, so keep them coming! I hope you like the new site and enjoy the richer content, once it gets going.

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My Dream Panels for WUDC Botswana

Image by Johan Koolwaaij via Flickr

Sitting around waiting for confirmation that our registration wire transfer made it to Gaborone is not doing great things for my nerves. The combination of a wait-list full of teams pre-judged by the community at large as being “essential” to the World Championship combined with my institution’s incapability of finding someone who can execute a wire transfer when the wire transfer guy is on vacation means that registering quick on the keyboard last month was the easy part of ensuring attendance at Worlds this year.

Meanwhile, the CA for Botswana Worlds has announced a new initiative – which I am certain you’ve heard of by now: The World Debate Forum. This is where panels, discussions, and presentations on debate will occur, all from the community of participants in Worlds debating.

A great idea, to say the least. A very SXSW move for the debate community to make – and I think it’s going to take off. Originally, back when I was an undergraduate, South By Southwest (linked above) was just a bunch of bands playing a bunch of venues. A great party with some really talented performances going on. You could perform if you were talented, or you could watch if you were not. I think the original SXSW, held annually in Austin, Texas, is a pretty good metaphor for what Worlds debating is like: Talent on display, you can try to display your talent, and a great party is brewing all around.

Then South By Southwest decided to add in some panels, presentations, and other creative elements to the roster. Now SXSW is arguably the premiere national (USA) and international conference for Web 2.0, developers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, technology companies, and much more. All from introducing the element of panels, something very reflexive and with a flavor quite a bit different from the origin of the event.

I think WUDC has the same chance in the World Debate Forum. I think it’s going to change Worlds by giving it more relief, more texture, and more opportunity for synthesis and cooperation. We have some of the sharpest people in the world together for 9 days in some of the most interesting places in the world, and now we have a formal session for the sharing of ideas, the communication of desires, and the presentation of new ways to take debate to the next, or at least a different, level of performance.

Not sure if I am going to be able to attend these panels, but I am certain they are going to feature some really great ideas. Some rising stars of WUDC future leadership may be established during it. And I know many people will look at each other and say, “What a great idea!” a few times. I hope I am able to see a few. But, you know, wire transfer issues. Yea. So to distract myself from the crapshoot of my future, I have assembled a list of essential panels and presentations that I believe have to happen in order to take full advantage of the new dimension offered here.

1) The Purpose of WUDC: Articulating the Vision

What is the point of spending all this time and money and energy? To win a cup? To win a title? To network? To challenge yourself? To party? To travel the world while feeling like you are doing something intellectual? I bet the list could go on much longer than that. It would benefit the community to have a panel where three to five well thought out, well articulated and argued, and well defended visions of the point of WUDC were articulated, questioned each other, and then took questions from the audience. Nothing would be better for setting the tone of the new World Debate Forum in the spirit of a debating championship. Nothing could be more important for new initiates to see the differing visions of those who love and participate in this contest each year. And for the rest of us, maybe a new idea will pop out greater than any of us if we allowed ourselves to have the conversation brewing at the back of our minds at least once or twice during the week.

2) Registration: What Do We Value?

I can already predict that the Org Comm and the Botswana crew are going to get a ton of presentations on how to make registration more fair. I believe this is the most important question facing the future of WUDC debate, and the one that has the most potential to alter WUDC debate from what we know it as today. So the begged question must be addressed: What do we value having at the WUDC? This roundtable, panel, or open discussion could pave the way to the creation of a more permanent working group that could draw up the principles of WUDC competitive value, a document that should make the choosing of a registration process academic for any convener. The questions for framing could be: What, if any, is the value of reserving a slot for every country? What, if any, is allowing each country that has attended before have at least one slot? What, if any, is the value of basing registration on speed of entry? This will be a way of discussing registration through the boxcar of ideological baggage that tags along with the process that gets chosen. It might be a nice way of talking about registration without getting too angry about it!

3) Education: Why and What Do We Teach?

I am new to the WUDC community. I have made many great friends who are also great teachers. Whenever I am there, I suspect many great teachers are lurking about. I don’t really know how to strike up the sort of conversation I want to have with them. For this panel, I envision a room with many posters and presenters. I could walk around and see presentations on teaching activities, curriculum ideas, games, and programs for preparing debaters. I suspect that many in the debate world are great teachers, they just don’t call themselves that. I would like to see what everyone is up to, and why they are up to it. I would like to share ideas. And I would like to see what it takes in your mind to prepare the next generation of WUDC champs.

4) Outreach and Mission

There are many countries that we expect to see at WUDC, but some that we hardly ever see. What is the state of debate like in those countries? Is it possible, or even desireable, for WUDC to reach out to and encourage particular Institutions in those places to participate in WUDC? How does this dovetail at all with the mission and purpose of WUDC?

I suspect these issues will come up a bit since the competition is in Africa, and a lot of attention is focused in the debate world on Africa and African tournaments right now. I think the conversations will lean toward African debate, but this is just a start. I imagine a couple of panels that investigate and present on the state of debate in a certain region or country, and a few that interrogate the idea of debate promotion from and within the WUDC. In the end, the identity of WUDC is definitely at play here – is it a club for gamers, a public intellectual championship, or an educational institution? Or some combination of the three?

5) Technology’s Promise and Threat

WUDC is popular, and somewhat overcrowded at times. The capacity is outstripped by the demand during registration. The internet provides some promise of hope for a few, but threatens the way the championships traditionally run. What are some of the transitional models, hybrid models, and future structures of a championships that has more than 900 teams willing to enter? We are headed toward this future as more and more people wish to attend and participate in this great community. How can technology help us? What threats from web technologies are there that we need to be aware of? Early adopters, internet pioneers, and interested groups can show off, conduct, or theorize about the role of internet communication and the future of WUDC in these sessions. The payoff is one where we confront and start to talk about these sorts of changes before they are forced upon us.

 

So there’s my short list. I believe the World Debate Forum is a great and quite promising step toward a new type of WUDC. I hope someone proposes and some of you participate on panels such as these. I know there are a lot of pressing issues, but these five panel areas are ripe, timely, and essential to all of the other conversations that the World Debate Forum can have.

Now to check on that wire transfer. . .

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