Posts filed under ‘Sophie Elsner’
How do you teach what’s really important?
Yesterday I walked through the familiar maroon doors of Stephen F. Austin High School, a building that I knew all too well for a four-year period. Since graduating from high school, however, I have avoided stepping onto the campus, appreciating my education and memories from a distance. But yesterday I returned to Room 302, my old debate classroom, with all the same posters on the walls and only a few minor changes in the arrangement of the desks.
In hindsight, my return to this classroom makes sense. Of all the activities I participated in during high school, I most obviously see the benefits of debate. The skills that I gained in this activity transferred to my writing in literature classes, my analysis of statistics and my ability to argue with my parents at the dinner table. Learning how to debate has immediate impacts and ferments the desire to think critically about the realities of our world and then go on to solve some of these problems. In theory, it is an incredible activity.
Yet even now I have the exact same complaints with debate that I did in high school. Why do we have to learn the terminology? Why do we have to follow so many rules? Why does one person have to be declared a winner when the issues are so vast? Why don’t we get so angry at the government or corporations or failed programs that we actually walk out of the classrooms and do something about it? Why does improving at this activity bring one into an even more isolated world of hypothetical conversations instead of promoting activism?
Teaching debate in Providence, rather than participating in the activity as a student, is now becoming its own form of activism. Yes, I am still spending my afternoons in high school classrooms instead of at the State House, but now I enter these schools with more of a mission. Our goal is not just to teach students how to research, read tough authors or speak articulately. Even more, we want to show these students that this ability to think about complex issues will enable them to affect future micro and macro policy decisions. Many of our lawmakers are former debaters; many people in power grew up with this activity. We at the RIUDL want bright, motivated Rhode Island public high school students to have the passion and credentials to be the next agents of change.
This socially conscious goal was never explicitly expressed in my high school debate program. We talked about tournaments and the specific topics and which intellectual could be most helpful to a certain position. Yet the spirit of social change must have somehow seeped into us, because most of my peers and I went on to care about something broader than the internal world of debate. We looked back and got what it was really about.
Now I sit here comparing my experience of high school to the mission of the Swearer Center, which expressly communicates its desire to address inequalities, share knowledge of the public good and “prepare students for lives of effective action.” Debate taught me to do all of these things, but even today I have no idea if that was the intention of my coaches or by chance. If it was by chance, should I just trust that debate imparts these same goals and desires on all participants? If it was a focus of my high school coaches, must I too make these goals so subtle?
These questions are perhaps what any teacher or parent asks: If I have a clear goal, do I make it known or just hope that all turns out well? Or do I let these desires develop organically, and avoid steering people in any one direction? This is perhaps an issue of trust – in a program, in another person, in the culmination of many experiences and observations.
Going back to Austin High felt good; I no longer felt the anxieties of being a high school student. I could view my education with a distance, even in the building that housed much of it. But returning did not answer my questions of intentions or expectations of my debate coaches. And perhaps this is one of the great secrets of debate: under the mask of concern over competition or trophies, everyone in this world understands the gravity and power of this activity on the lives of these students and the future of our society.
Sophie Elsner
Rhode Island Urban Debate League
Rewriting a Curriculum & Redefining my Relationship to the RIUDL
If designing a comprehensive and engaging debate curriculum for Rhode Island high school students were easy, someone likely would have done it in the past ten years. In the RIUDL’s history, various Brown students and Providence teachers have worked to modify how we teach debate. Some would argue that our curriculum has succeeded: many students, frequently coming from underserved schools, can discuss complex concepts and policies. Others would say that despite our best intentions, the students entering the RIUDL with the strongest reading and writing backgrounds are almost always the ones who win; we know how to teach debate, but perhaps only in a way that benefits most privileged students. My partner Matt Grimes and I hold a view that falls somewhere in the middle. We have a lot of faith in debate, and we know that something is working. Yet even after ten years, the RIUDL has not completely learned how to overcome the challenges of working with students who lack reading skills, free time after school, or access to the Internet and good libraries. Our task is not to create the dream curriculum for debate but rather to design one that is exciting, challenging and manageable for our participants.
One question that we face concerning curriculum is: are we revising or revolutionizing? As Matt and I began to question the outcomes of the RIUDL – Were we engaging enough students? Were we serving participants as well as possible? Were we teaching debate in a way that truly gave every student a chance at winning? – we never thought about changing the model of the RIUDL. We believe that the RIUDL’s partnership with the Swearer Center and the Providence Public School District is valuable for everyone involved. We trust that through debate we can accomplish our goals of education and commitment to national and global issues. We always thought that the RIUDL had enough strength to be remodeled from within.
Can the same be said for our curriculum specifically? Is what we have now strong enough to provide a foundation for further development, or do we need to completely revamp the way we teach debate? What intimidates me most about the latter possibility is not the task itself, but that perhaps by taking on this difficult goal, we are lacking a sense of humility that two college students should have. In the RIUDL triangle of teachers, Brown volunteers and high school students, Matt and I find ourselves in a strange place. We help to run this organization, but we also recognize that we work with professionals who have dedicated their careers to teaching students. Yes, we have the debate background; but are we qualified to tell others how to effectively transmit knowledge?
I’m sure many of my peers are facing these same questions as we all try to find a balance between offering support, a fresh perspective and valid criticism while respecting the efforts of community partners who have long been in the field that we entered relatively recently. Throughout my two years with the RIUDL, I have tried to find my place as both a student and a leader. Taking on more obligations this summer and in the coming year will only force more introspection in how to humbly, responsibly and thoughtfully participate in an organization that has a strong foundation yet also needs some extensive repairs.
A New Model for Providence Conversations: Rewriting the Curriculum of the Rhode Island Urban Debate League
Like most driving ideas of an organization, this one came right after the group meeting. After a weekend focused on debate – with an all day tournament and a Brown volunteer meeting – we could not get our minds off the difficult issues that continued to stump us. Why were some students always losing rounds when they had no fear of public speaking? Why, even in an Urban Debate League, were the students from the “most successful” Providence schools winning tournaments? How could we, as leaders of the RIUDL, change the game of debate so that anyone might want to be a part of it and have a realistic chance at rising to the top?
Matt and I agreed that the need for these questions reflected a stagnant curriculum. We were working hard, as were other Brown volunteers, Providence coaches and the debaters themselves, but we still did not know how to best pass along the skills of debate to those new to the activity. This was a big task: teaching one of the hardest, multi-level activities to already busy high school students who were rarely eager to put in extra effort after a long school day. But we had loved it as debaters ourselves, and we decided it was our job to make debate fun, relevant and still educational.
At this point, we have a lot of support for the league and our revised curriculum, yet we must deal with a variety of criticisms and viewpoints: some think there is too much focus on competition, others not enough. Some coaches are comfortable teaching debaters of all levels; others would prefer to let the Brown volunteers lead practices. I know what worked for me as a high school debater, but mine cannot be the only voice I listen to, which is why Matt and I partnered up, to constantly be reminded that every person comes with their own perspective. One of the greatest challenges that lies ahead of us is how to create a curriculum that engages and empowers many students, giving them the opportunity to put forth original ideas and confident speak about national policy, given the limited time we have to work with them. This is a challenge faced by Urban Debate Leagues all over the nation, and we aim to find out how others have faced it successfully and what we can do to reform the RIUDL.
Reform can be more challenging than creating something new. We are working with people who have notions about how the RIUDL should operate, largely based on tradition. But this is the challenge I love: to take something good and make it great.
