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.

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.

There has been a growing movement in and out of academia, and among public thinkers (those on the circumference, let’s say, of the public intellectual set), at least since November, 2016, to try to address the deep political and social divisions in this country, to redress the widening gap that is caused by an ever-more suffusive tribalism separating groups of people and making debates and even civil conversations increasingly difficult.  The Better Arguments Project, fostered by the Aspen Institute and led by writer Eric Liu, is one organization advancing this cause.

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We have been working with our middle school partners’ social studies teachers on an argument-centered project that has students studying and making arguments about the great inventors and inventions of the 19th and 20th centuries.  The project can be implemented in a middle school science and engineering unit, too.  And with some additional researching and reading, it is appropriate for a 9th or 10th grade social science classroom.  We have designed it to fit within one week of classes, so it is also a bit more compact than most classroom debate projects.

Otis Middle School (Chicago) social studies teacher Elizabeth Valente has adaptively re-designed our resources into what she calls an Evidence Catcher for the project we have been working together on in her argument-centered ancient Greece unit this semester.  The resource represents another exemplar of our goal that teachers at our partner schools acquire the capacity to design and deploy their own argumentalized and critical thinking enriched curricular resources.  Ms. Valente has agreed to share this resource, at which it is well worth taking a closer look.