Workshops for Faculty

Last week I did my first faculty workshop on using debate as a teaching tool. It was well attended (about 27 faculty came around lunchtime) and we had good free food and a nice discussion.

A couple of highlights before I go into more depth on it. First, many were from the traditional sciences and didn’t see much of a role for debate in their courses. By the end they understood that it can be a tool to help students understand fundamental controversies in their discipline.

The second was nicely summed up on anonymous notecards that we handed out to faculty to reflect on a mini-debate we had – 2 faculty had a short 2 minute speech debate on replacing examinations with debates in class.

One of the cards said “I can see debate now as a process, not a win/lose proposition.” That sort of insight from a 45 minute session made me feel pretty good.

And somewhere Joseph Wenzel is smiling I’m sure!

More on the workshop later, for now I have to teach.

Debate as a part of sense-making for climate change

This website purports to be a collaborative data collection project for the upcoming UN climate change conference.  They hope to use debate as one of the methods for collaboratively gathering data and perspectives.

What is most interesting is the lack of attention given to format, or to debate in general on the website.  They claim, “The project is founded on principles of openness, transparency, and
discovery; with no preconceptions about the conclusions that will
emerge from the event.”

I think this is a great perspective, and I am certain debate, in whatever form, can contribute to this project. But I wonder if the organizers of this collective intelligence gathering have considered the recalcitrant aspects of debate – that everything comes under investigation, even the idea of “climate change” itself.

This is one of the underdiscussed areas of the use of debate for information construction or pedagogical purposes – the fact that it encourages participants to think in ways that continuously unravel the sweater when all you wanted was to clip a few loose threads.

Sick

Well the timing couldn’t be better – the first weekend off from a tournament in a while and I get a bit of a cold or something. So I’m being lazy around my apartment trying not to get worse.

Since I’m stuck inside on some pretty nice days trying to get well, I plan to just catch up on writing and reading, two things that I rarely have time to do in the middle of the debate season. Here are my projects:

1. Final edits are soon due on an essay about Kenneth Burke and William Carlos Williams that has been accepted to a journal. Today I plan to add in some additional resources I’ve found and tighten up the grammar.

2. I need to make corrections to and major structural changes are needed to an essay (now potential book chapter) about Levinas in conversation with Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrects-Tyteca. That project is one that was back-burnered by me quite by accident. Time to blow off the dust.

3. If there’s time left in the day, begin the preliminary research into an essay about argumentation on the internet through flash animation, using the Roman idea of declamation as a heuristic.

Thank god I got off my ass and did all my grading earlier in the week when I felt somewhat human. Time for some more tea.