Mission Statement

This curriculum was created by the Baltimore Urban Debate League in response to a request from North Avenue to infuse debate into the summer school programs for US History and Government classes. It is part of a larger effort on the part of the school system to infuse debate into classrooms across Baltimore City.

This course represents an innovative approach to the dilemma of teaching a substantive course within the confines of four weeks of summer school. The challenges of successfully teaching this course are enormous, and it is our attempt to meet this challenge that created the teaching approach which Baltimore City has decided to employ for the first time this summer. This approach relies entirely on the use of debate as a tool to achieve knowledge and critical thinking skills inside of a discipline in four short weeks.

Debate in this context has never been used. Our assumption that debate will be successful in summer school, given the fact that we have never tried what we are about to do, is based on the proven track record of debate in other contexts (including use in the classroom) to generate enthusiasm around a topic, and to chaperone critical thinking around that topic. Though we have tried to map out much of what a teacher should do in this course, so as to make things easier for you, there is great room for individual teachers to be creative inside of the framework we suggest.

We have chosen four major topics of debate for each week of each course offered (8 total). We have attempted to choose topics that are relevant to as many chapters of the history and government classes as possible, and it is true that there are many other topics that a clever teacher could employ to the same ends as we do here. We have assembled articles on each topic, and recommend that teachers find and share other relevant articles, particularly ones that suit the reading levels of students in the program.

An overt subset of our mission is to implement this summer school debate program using ideas from a new collaborative paradigm of staff development, as set out in recent communications from central office (see Japan memo). This new thinking on staff development encourages a more collaborative and creative approach, with the teacher at the center of change. Our goal insofar as this new paradigm is concerned requires that the experimental use of this curriculum during the summer of 2005 receive aggressive teacher feedback, and that we use this feedback to improve the model in the future. To that end you will see an important survey at the end of this packet.

Finally, one of the important side-effects of this summer work is that teachers who are teaching the class will go into the regular school year with an understanding of how debate can work in their classrooms. Any of the materials used in this four week program can and should be replicated in a regular semester long class.