Hello fellow directors and coaches, I'm making my first foray into posting on CEDA-L as promised. While not many people are talking publicly, I get a sense that people are listening, so I'm going to talk for a while longer. Some of us privately have begun conversations about the importance of finding an educational center to balance the competitive foundation that defines our activity. In this post, I'd like to restate what I've come up with, share a story that I think identifies the disconnect for me, and perhaps think about some ideas for going forward. 1) My first stab at a definition of policy debate, incorporating both an educational and competitive objective. Policy debate should be a competition about a public policy controversy involving advocates who share ideas and perspectives over problems by offering solutions, then engaging other ideas and perspectives towards a goal of finding the best policy. 2) What prevents that from occurring now? I go back to the beginning, fall 2000, when Louisville and it's 12 novice teams spent the season debating both sides of the topic with the political refusal of ever making the usually transition to faster debate, using a speed kritik to challenge others who did. The first semester, we almost never used the kritik, debating race slowly on the level playing field against other novices not versed in the techne of debate either. Well it was almost an equal playing field. Our arguments were still politically radical, outside the debate style issue: we ran reparations to Rwanda as development assistance on the affirmative and we ran a race kritik of US foreign policy on the negative. Even though the topic was sympathetic to race, the topic construction limited many of the radical viewpoints from the affirmative ground, but also limited the competitive negative ground as well. Meaning that the hurdle for us early was that debate theory would be our demise not debate techne. I remember that the topic meeting that summer created more frustration and alienation as anything I had felt to that moment in CEDA/NDT. I had just recuited a bunch of Black radical students from the Pan-African Studies Department, Black Student Union, and the most politically revolutionary high schoolers, Liz and Tonia, I could find and the arguments that OUR team would be most interested in debating were gutted from the topic before the season began. So we ran a non-topical affirmative and a generic kritik to get to where we wanted to be, the first of many competitive sacrifices to preserve motivation of a different population of students. Issue #1 - The political constraints created by the drive to preserve a narrowly defined form of competitive equity stop debaters drives important ideas and perspectives out of the activity. By focusing on what policies to include and exclude, more balance needs to ensure that ideas and perspectives of difference are not excluded as well. The radical Black perspective was important on that topic, perhaps on any topic, and efforts to ensure that it exists post topic development is important. I've heard other concerns expressed for "theory" and "gender", specifically Fullerton's call on the treaties topic. In spite of that, we won inconsistently and sporadically. 2 or 3 teams would clear, but there was never any consistency. I now think that was more about the politics of judges than it was about the quality of the debaters. We won enough to keep everyone motivated to stay. Speed became an issue as spring rolled around. At the time, we went to a lot of ADA tournaments, given the magnitude and quality of their novice division. While this also likely hurt our competitive success further given the general conservative nature of both debate and politics of judges there, it was only most economical choice given our geographic constraints. In the beginning, a novice, unable to truly use blocks, will likely resort more to talking as a debate advances. Reading of the 1AC, perhaps even the 1NC, turns into non-evidenced discussions that are less block and evidence oriented, so the preservation of shared ideas and perspectives that don't rely on evidence is much easier. The end of all of these debates is less evidence driven so other forms of argument, like examples, stories, and analogies are more likely deployed. How much of the non traditional evidence gets "flowed" and "evaluated" is another question that is likely very judge dependent, but I'll address that in a minute. As the novice debater learns the very specialized process of debate, which includes speed, flowing, using blocks which are almost exclusively traditional forms of evidence, it is easy to see how the other forms of evidence get crowded out. Examples, stories, and analogies have no value in the process. It starts in the evaluation process: judges have little utility for non-traditional evidence; debaters are trained to privilege a process that relies on blocks and a line by line to efficiency follow the trail of arguments. So as techne increases, it's easy to see how non traditional forms of evidence are lost. So diverse ideas and perspectives are gradually being lost as well. The early novice can use non traditional forms of argument, allowing more likelihood of sharing personal connections and perspectives, but as they become more sophisticated in the process, the competitive value of those are reduced. Issue #2 - The specialized process of contemporary policy debate has uncritically assumed to be a superior process, claiming to increase reliance on "evidence", but gone ignored is that it really increases one type of evidence by devaluing the use of other types, furthering reducing the likelihood that debaters will share personal ideas and perspectives, especially connected to personal experiences, but also examples and stories. At the end of that season, we decided to take our novices to CEDA Nationals: get a real test of our speed kritik and since we were going to move from novice to varsity, since our students wouldn't have to learn the techne of speed, we could get a sense of where our "project" was at. We received our introduction to frameworks and theory, and the notion that exclusion is good. I think that the organic growth of theory, in combination with the inferred assumption that the contemporary style is inferior creates a third problem. Issue #3- The evolution of debate theory perpetuates a subjective, unproven assertion of superiority that works to intentionally legitimate the exclusion of ideas and perspectives that are valuable to the educational process. 3) Going forward. All I got is my goodwill. My personal evolution is that I have followed in Plato's footsteps. Just like Plato evolved from his belief that rhetoric was the problem to a more critical perspective that it was the use of rhetoric and not rhetoric itself,I have gone from a past belief that the techne is the problem, but rather, how the techne is used. I offer our experiences as a starting point for thinking about how to better use the techne to achieve different educational outcomes than we currently have. The goal should be to use the techne in ways that don't reduce the ability of debate to engage all types of evidence, and preserve the maximum sharing of ideas and perspectives. Easier said than done, I dunno but this provides a start. Thanks for listening... Ede
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