Current Affairs in Debating

One of the best things about training a debating team is working with students to investigate areas of interest that fall outside the normal school curriculum.

With each newsletter release, Consensus provides a selection of different news articles that you can share, but there is even more value that can be found in establishing a system where students research and discover interesting media bytes on their own for the benefit of their learning.

This resource covers some of the best ways that we, at Consensus, have found to get students finding, engaging with, analysing and utilising current information in debates.

Generate a good mix of content

It’s not all facts and data that you’re trying to gather. The most informed students are ones who take information from a wide variety of sources, in a wide variety of forms. We’ve found that some of the best content for debating comes in the form of opinion articles that are arguing a particular position, videos on YouTube from people offering different perspectives, and even comments at the bottom of an article that are somewhat contrarian.

However your students choose to collect data, don’t worry too much about the source, but make sure where it was found is recorded (you won’t need to cite it, but it’s a core strategy for analyzing bias and ascertaining how much the viewpoint should be entertained, or simply just for finding something easily again).

Divide content

We’ve found that a fair division of the work is generally the best way to keep a team of debaters happy. Nominating particular focus areas for each person in a team not only reduces the potential for overlap and double handing, it also means that students can more readily engage in peer learning by presenting unique findings to their team.

Assigning broad areas of focus at the start of each term such as education, the environment, politics or pop culture can allow students to engage with the fact-finding mission in a more meaningful and targeted way. This is a particularly good strategy for squads of debaters (multiple teams or teams of more than four with a rotation speaking schedule) as it means that students have a way to engage with all material equally, as well as seeing times where team members use elements of their research during a debate.

Have a focus for any search

You should always guide your students when they are searching for current affairs. By this, we don’t mean that you should set explicit pieces of content for them to research as if they were engaging on a fact-finding mission for a report, but rather, that it’s important to establish some systems that allow for the data to be collected as efficiently as possible.

The basic rule that we would insist upon here is to limit the amount of articles on any given subject — meaning, no more than 3 items of content that focus on a particular subject area should ever be added to the mix. By establishing a rule like this, you avoid the tendency for students to fall ‘down the wikipedia hole’ and over-research particular areas — which in turn, ensures that teams don’t over-explain or develop a knowledge bias for a particular subject area.

Share with each other

Students sharing their findings with each other, whether they be articles, youtube videos or empirical studies, seems to be a ‘no-brainer’ part of the process, but the process of sharing and collaborating is actually often overlooked.

Putting time aside at the beginning of each training session to share media is a good way to ensure that findings are valued, and having a few other channels for communication (a message thread, online classroom or group) than in-person will mean that your team doesn’t feel as though all of their shares need to be ‘high value’. Gaining an understanding of current affairs is an ongoing process, and, as we are always interrogating our sources as debaters, it is one of the few areas where quantity of data is very important.

Interpreting research for debating

A valuable step beyond students gathering and sharing their findings is learning to interpret its relevance for debating. A first and obvious step is for students to identify which debating topic ‘area’ their research best fits. Next, it’s useful to identify a specific topic in that area and how the article might inform each side of the debate. Following that, students can examine how to attempt to apply the information in the article to the aspects of case and argument formation, such as context, factual proof or behavioural proof.

Asking students to analyse and interpret their research in this way reinforces the stepping stones of case construction, and helps teams cut to the key aspects of consistent thread development in all their argumentation.