Teaching L/D in the classroom
Let me first start by echoing Danny’s wishes for a great new year. Many of us are either starting new classes, or in some sort of winter/inter session and revising our spring syllabi. I though I would take advantage of the opportunity to start some conversation about how to teach L/D in the classroom.
One idea that has become very prevalent in the modern curriculum is collaboration. The human resources people that hire for American industries have found that working as part of a team is a skillset that many American (and particularly American) students lack. Obviously, that is partially due to our individualist orientation (“it’s my grade, not our grade”) and partially due to our educational structure (“you will all work together, but get separate grades”). One method I really like is making evidence-gathering collaborative using technology. Like many people, my school (Cal Baptist) invests in online educational technologies, and the one I use is Blackboard.
When I give out an evidence assignment (such as an affirmative case), I share a particular format and model for the way the evidence brief should be presented. I ask the students to e-mail me their assignments. After I receive them, they are graded, but then they are re-formatted (to match my initial instructions if there are any problems), and then uploaded to the class Blackboard page for any other member of the class to peruse. Under “Course Documents” I make a special folder called “Debate evidence” in which everyone else’s assignment is posted. I emphasize to the class that no one is obligated to use their own evidence as part of the in-class debates. Often, the students themselves will take pieces of each other’s affirmatives (for example) to make their own affirmative to be used in the class debates.
Additionally, I add all the members of the school’s speech and debate team to the Blackboard class as well. Those debaters can then scan the in-class submissions for items that may be useful to the debate teams as a whole. The last two years, our squad’s first affirmative of the year has been constructed this way.
Lastly, the members of the class who are not part of the speech and debate team get excited when they find out that the evidence that they found and turned in ends up being used by the speech and debate team at a tournament.
I believe the days of “turn it in and make copies for the rest of the team” are gone, or at least on their way out. I would be interested in other strategies for electronic evidence collaboration, or any other techniques for using L/D in the classroom.
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Thanks Mike for bringing up this subject!
I taught LD in my class last semester (parli this semester). I found it very straightforward to teach the stock issues case which was nice. It was also good to have the one topic throughout the semester – I got to incorporate Cuba into a lot of our lectures and felt my students really became knowledgeable on the subject.
It also works well with the individualism Mike talks about – a one-on-one debate allows the students to prepare for their own debates. It also avoids the problem of partner’s not showing up for the debate and leaving the one debater alone to debate.
I didn’t try the evidence sharing like Mike described but instead asked each student to bring in an article that was then shared with the rest of the class. I did make physical copies but using an electronic process would be much easier and save lots of paper – great suggestion for next time.
I would certainly recommend it to other instructors to try in their classes.