This summer I have been working with high school chess coaches and players in Chicago, helping them apply their expertise in the game to their teaching and learning, respectively.  This work is part of Argument-Centered Education’s Academic Competitions Classroom Infusion Series (ACCIS), outlined in a prior Debatifier post.  This post is devoted to two of the larger set of resources that we developed together, applying the underlying academic components of chess to regular classroom teaching and learning in the core subjects, in a manner very parallel to the way that Argument-Centered Education has brought academic debate into regular classroom instruction by distilling the essential its components and infusing them throughout the school day.  

Nobel Prize winning writer Toni Morrison’s second novel, Sula, is relatively short (at about 180 pages) but challenging, as its style is a kind of uncompromising vernacular, and its characterization is stark, extreme, almost gothic, without a whole lot for teenage readers to warm up to.  But the novel’s ambition is unmistakable. It is an august work and it rewards patience, readerly fortitude, and close study.  Writing in the early 1970s (Sula was published in 1973), Morrison was committed to addressing questions rapidly fermenting in the culture involving gender, racial, socio-economic, sexual liberation, through a language and an imagery intrinsic to African-American culture that was demythologized and in some ways purified.

Part 1 of this post — which includes the argument and counter-argument builder exercise and models, in addition to description of the way that these have been used with partner teachers this spring and summer — can be found here.  This post will be devoted to highlighting some of the points of professional learning that have come about through our argument work on the debatable question, Is soccer the best sport in the world?

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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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As you may know, I spent 15 years of my career building urban debate leagues, which are organized competitive debate programs in urban public school systems.  I was the founding director of the Chicago Debate League, and helped build it into the nation’s model UDL.  I was also the founding director of the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues, where I helped create and build up urban debate leagues in a dozen cities across the country.  When I left urban debate five years ago to found Argument-Centered Education I thought that I had spent my last hour working with teacher-coaches who prepare for weekend competitions.  Mostly true, but along came ACCIS, which in some ways does for other academic competitions what I am doing for debate with ACE.