Lincoln-Douglas Debate Overview
Our pedagogy is student-centered and privileges active learning through experience. It is not our goal to deposit mountains of information in students' minds, but rather to familiarize students with the process of thinking through, researching, and developing complete, compelling arguments on each new topic. In other words, we want you to leave the camp feeling confident in your ability to research any topic and craft high quality cases on your own. This means that we seek to build foundational skills in creative, critical thinking, responsible research, and argument construction more than we wish to teach how to argue about any single topic or philosopher.
With this in mind, our curriculum unfolds in three stages. First, students will plunge into debating. Before students even arrive at camp they will receive a sizeable packet of quality evidence on one of the NFL topics for next year. Students will spend the first two days constructing affirmative and negative cases in hands-on workshops with our faculty. Within the first week, everyone will debate at least twice, once on the affirmative and once on the negative. During this week and the next, philosophy seminars and debate skills practicums will supplement the practice debates. The specific content of these supplementary sessions will be planned in consultation with student needs as diagnosed in the early practice debates and in pre-camp conversations with campers and their coaches. The second week of the institute will be devoted to collectively researching another one of the NFL topics from scratch. This will give students a chance to tackle a new topic under the guidance of our faculty. We will learn how to define terms, brainstorm in a thorough and flexible fashion, pinpoint where to find the most helpful research materials, pick the most relevant and compelling philosophies for any given topic, and in general move from knowing nothing about a new topic to being ready to debate that topic in sophisticated fashion within a few days. All research will be shared with every camper, and the topic we research will be used for our institute tournament during the third week. During that third week students will receive two opportunities to independently develop the skills taught in the earlier weeks. Time will be split between further research on the tournament topic, learning how to fill holes and develop arguments in response to what students here in debates, and exploratory research on one of the remaining NFL topics for next year. Students will choose which one of the remaining topics they most want to work on and then produce annotated bibliographies and packs of starter evidence. This work will be shared with all campers.
Our firmest belief is that the best way to learn how to debate is to debate as much as possible. We promise that each student will leave our camp with no less than 5 debates for each week they are with us. Each debate will be watched and extensively critiqued by a faculty member. However, we will also provide opportunities for students to watch their peers' debates and judge rounds alongside the faculty. Students will fill out ballots and write out extensive reasons for their decisions. We believe that judging rounds will help students appreciate how different arguments can sound from the judge's seat. This exercise helps hone one's ability to discern just what will and will not matter by the end of the debate. Students will also receive intensive instruction on improving rebuttals and properly crystallizing the round in the last speech. Each student will have at least one rebuttal re-do for each week they are at the camp. In these sessions, students will re-give a rebuttal from one of the practice debates, talk through the new speech with a faculty member, and then give the speech again. At least one of these re-do sessions will be recorded and given to the student so that they can continue to learn from the experience after they leave. We will also fill out extensive faculty reports for each student that chronicle that debater's camp experience from our vantage point, including lists of where the student showed the most improvement and what we think most needs improvement and attention for the upcoming debate season. These reports will be given to both students and their coaches.