The history of American intercollegiate debate practice is mostly the tracking of metaphors. Debate instructors and debate practice has always been connected to some metaphor that communicates the value and importance of debate as an educational practice.

Since the mid 20th century, that metaphor has only been “fair competition” and further reduced to “fair tournament competition” which governs nearly every decision made in the teaching and learning of debate.

This metaphor I of course find revolting, although there is a defense of it. Tabling that, it could probably be agreed that the presence of new and better metaphors for debate instruction and practice benefits everyone who teaches and practices debate. The more and varied ways to understand what we are doing, the more and varied ways we have to innovate, try new things, and engage in visionary practices that could benefit us.

In this paper I argue that the competitive cooking show is a great metaphor for competitive debate pedagogy. I look at three shows in this short talk and discuss how and why I think they would be good metaphors. See what you think of the talk, and later on in the week (or next week) I’ll post the full paper.