Half of a Yellow Sun is an epic historical novel, with a romance novel embedded within it, about the Nigerian Civil War (1967 – 1970).  It was published in 2006, by that country’s most internationally celebrated writer, after Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Adichie.  Adichie may be best known to American students for her 2009 TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” which has been watched nearly 4 million times.

One of the most popular and well-regarded books on academic writing ever written, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing, has just been published in a fourth edition.  Professors Graff and Birkenstein are, of course, university advisers of Argument-Centered Education and their book has been seminal in the development and national expansion of argument pedagogy.  If you are not using it or portions of it in your classroom — and most certainly if you are not familiar with it — I urge you to pick up a copy of this new edition and dive in.  Part of its appeal is its simplicity and usability.  They Say, I Say has the grace and pellucidity of a late-period Willem de Kooning ribbon painting; a whole lot of learning, theorizing, and teaching is condensed and distilled into what the authors call “the deep, underlying structure, the internal DNA as it were, of all effective argument.”

I see a lot of documentaries, and one of the very best I’ve seen in a long while was “I Am Not Your Negro,” the 2016 film directed by Raoul Peck.  The film was created from a set of unpublished writings by James Baldwin. Read by Samuel L. Jackson, they provide the only voiceover. Baldwin was working on a book, one that he did not complete but for which he prepared extensive notes, taking a distinctly autobiographical look at the divergent and convergent lives and deaths of three towing civil rights leaders: Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X.

I have recently been working with a partner school’s science department and its renewable energy unit.  The unit takes a kind of “nuts and bolts” approach to the variety of energy sources that currently produce the world’s energy supply, looking at technological practicalities and some of the science and engineering — and economic — principles at work in the viability of each type of renewable energy projected to be part of the world’s transition this century away from traditional fossil fuels.  We decided to focus our argumentalization on a four-day portion of the unit that uses “Switch.”

All of the Argument-Centered Education partner middle schools have implemented classroom debating projects this spring semester and I can honestly say that all had verified successes, in some of the same and in some varying ways.  The Helen C. Peirce School of International Studies conducted classroom debates in several grade levels; we captured some of the 7th grades table debates in different classes, led by different teachers, and I wanted to share them to demonstrate how representatively successful implementation of MS argument-centered unit can culminate.