Debate Coach makes me cringe for so many reasons. I’m not sure I can list them all here. The first concern with this term I share with William Hawley Davis, Professor of Speech at Case Western in 1916, who worried that teaching debate for competition made his role “adjunct to sport.” If there is a debate coach, there is a debate sport. There should not be a debate sport, unless it’s something that is performed with everyday activities that can be evaluated as having moments of practiced excellence. For example, throwing or catching a ball, running, swimming, jumping – all are elements of things anyone can do, they understand how these things are done. Debate eliminates the connection with everyday rhetorical practices, providing their own “purified” modes of speaking, listening, note taking, evidence, that are designed to be inaccessible to everyday people, and they then call that inaccessibility excellence. There’s no recognition here of excellence, just something surprising.
I’ve always thought the best metaphor for debate is a martial art, where the competitions are based on mastering particular moves, and then mastering those moves in combinations. Most interestingly, martial arts competitions are examined for evidence of practice as communicated through form and execution. Tournament debate is often judged on what is novel and surprising; what exciting new position can be created in the moment. There are few techniques and even fewer practices that can be taught, or seen in evaluation, in tournament debate. It’s most often about surprising the opposition rather than relying on process to invent convincing arguments.
Debate competitions designed like martial arts would have elements of Roman declamation along with elements of exchange on an issue that everyone can access and discuss. What sets the excellent debater apart will be the ability to craft and deliver arguments in a way that improve the quality and the possibility of argument for the audience. The judge should be able to recognize someone who takes this art seriously and has practiced it, they have a process where the weight of engagement with the issue is communicated in the delivery and nature of the arguments.
This though is not a sport, which is probably for the best. It’s a way of self-assessment in your discipline to see how you measure up in your practice and focus on debating.
Debate Educator is a better term perhaps, but this term is often hijacked by tournament addicts to make their style or preference of tournament sound superior to the tournament style they hate.
I hear this term when people are trying to position themselves as a leader or influencer of some novel type of debate activity. The idea is a good one: Someone who educates through debate seems like something I’d support. But the reality is that these people are often educating about debate, i.e. the right way to do it.
The rhetorical understanding of debate, and some elements of the philosophical side of it, all agree that the correct way of debating is tied up intensely with audience. You cannot create a modality of debating and ship it wholesale onto an audience. They always have a say in what is going on. Or in highly rhetorical views, like my own, debate does not exist without an audience. If you have audience-free debate, you are doing something else. The fact that recordings and internet broadcasts of debate tournaments are not a required part of the competitions indicates the flat dismissal of the rhetorical perspective, placing debate tournaments out of synch with the history and theory of rhetorical scholarship.
A debate educator would be someone who would use debate as a significant part of a plan or a process of approaching pedagogy on a number of subjects. It would not be “this form of having a debate with other people is superior to this other form.” This is far too often what the debate educator sounds like.
Teacher is my favorite title for the sort of work that debate engenders, and it’s strange to me (although I do recognize the historical reasons here) that few professors like the title teacher, or consider teaching to be something praiseworthy. It was taught to me in my PhD program as something one tolerates in order to do the “real work.”
Debate Teacher has some weird issues with it that are similar to debate educator, or can fall into the same sorts of traps. Educator is rather snobby, and teacher sounds like and feels like someone who gets down into the trenches. An educator I can see speaking at a conference; a teacher brings to mind the image of someone leaning over next to the desk of a student engaging what they are engaging, ensuring and assisting something educational.
I’m very upset about how the title Professor of Practice gets a negative rap as the title that austerity administrators at the University are using to designate non-tenure track professors. I love the title, as it indicates a powerful relationship between the art of teaching, professing something (as in an emotional expression of what and how things should be in the world), and dedication to practice as the thing, not preparation for the more important thing coming later, which is how sports are coached. A focus on practice as practice is what rhetorical pedagogy needs and is and should be, all together. I love this title, but unfortunately it has been co-opted by the economic realities of the university.
Professor of Debate Practice might be cool. An emotive, passionate advocate for the practice of debating as a pedagogical orientation to the world. That’s what I have always found most exciting about debate are the moments when students start to look for process. Once they find something that works, they go around testing that part of process on everything they find worth thinking about. Tournament debate is so limiting in it’s methods and capacity for thought that eventually students grow beyond it pretty quickly if they are being taught right. They do preserve the element of process though and hopefully create connections between that experience and later inquiry.
In composition, they have the titles Writing Consultant (a bit too corporate for my tastes, but I get the idea) and Writing Center Director as well as Composition Professor or Rhetoric and Composition Professor which is really great, as it communicates that there are two elements here. But people from NCA oriented departments would never accept a title like Rhetoric and Oratory Professor because it would indicate too plainly that they teach, and there’s a weird negativity in NCA-focused departments on the teaching of public speaking. The representative anecdote for this is the story I heard from a pretty high ranking professor dismissing the idea that all new faculty hired should teach public speaking by saying, “We don’t want to punish them.” This is a pretty common attitude, and one that Writing Centers, and most Rhetoric & Composition people would find extremely alien. It raises a big question for me: Who would claim to be a Rhetoric Professor and not want to hear and help people gain new perspectives on their speech?
What’s in a name indeed. The naming convention of Debate Coach needs to transform into something that highlights the powerful elements of pedagogy that are deep within the debate experience. Coaching is a gestalt that brings forward sports and zero-sum games. It conjures the idea that there’s talent related to the democratic art of debate rather than this is a difficult necessity that all must learn how to do; all must struggle through the never-ending challenges of deliberation.
Not sure what title would work best, or what people would be proud of. I certainly hated being called a coach, but I recognize I’m in the minority. What title best communicates the complexity, power, and necessity of education through the act of creating and advocating two-sided arguments before an audience or judge?
