What does it mean to be a novice? According to the US, for the most part, it means being in your first year of University level debating. That’s the definition that Cornell University is going with in their first ever WUDC USA Novice National Championship tournament.
For years, back when there was just policy debate here on the East Coast (APDA and CEDA never spoke, nor acknowledged one another – might still be the case but there’s some contact now) we celebrated the novice debater as a culturally significant subject position – such as the roles that “immigrant” “lawyer” “doctor” “preacher” “child” “homemaker” “father” “teacher” “firefighter” have in society and language. We did this at Towson University in Maryland with a Novice National Championship.
In policy debate, not everyone debates one another. There are separate divisions where debaters of similar skill face one another. So if you are in your first year of debating, it’s considered appropriate to only debate those in their first year of debating. After you have debated 24 college debates, you move to Junior Varsity. If you debated in High School, you are put in JV right away. Open is reserved for those who are nearing the end of their University debating lives.
The Novice Nationals was a holy place – people who started debate in University were a special subject position. No high school experience, and only a short time to perfect the techne of policy debate, as well as the exponential exposure to new and exciting ideas and texts also help romanticize the position of “novice” as an incredibly desirable identity. On the East Cost of the US, many programs adopted the rhetoric that novices were the life-blood of debate in this geographic region, going so far as to announce at multiple tournaments, when the time for novice awards came – “Now awards in our most important division.”
This romantic image of the novice parallels the rhetorical rise of “childhood,” a 19th century upper-class phenomenon that rises and orbits around the arbitrary connection of age to knowledge. The rhetorical style of childhood, then is associated with books and their cool ability to forbid knowledge an experience from those who either can’t read the symbols, or don’t have the bodily discipline to engage in reading a book. Childhood becomes a repository of innocence simply because of the limits of the preferred medium of information. As we can see, it’s eroding around us with the prominence of TV and the internet. Children are too worldly for us these days, and we lament the past. This is a rather rough summary, and if you want to read more about this, I suggest The Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman.
Calls for distinct novice divisions and separate categories for the participation of only novices are in line with an attempt to preserve a rather arbitrary and strange category that is only an effect of a chosen form of information processing and transfer. In policy debate, such divisions are defensible on the grounds that one has to be disciplined into the formulaic way of speaking – a novice can be a great speaker and really compelling, and lose every debate due to their unfamiliarity with the conventions of the form.
This defensive practice has pedagogical reasons, but ends up creating a ready-made subject position for the novice debater that everyone simultaneously laughs at and loves. In short, a childhood within the medium.
This form is so powerful that since the inception of WUDC/BP here on the East coast, calls for novice divisions and larger numbers of breaking teams have been defended with the same sort of arguments one would make for children learning adult games. “they’ll quit!” “they need that special outround experience!” and other such claims are heard.
I suggest treating debate students like the adults they are and treating debate like the examination of your mind that it should be. Preparing students for the inevitability of loss and gain in the world, the certainty that they are not as smart as they think they are, and the disappointing prospect of doing one’s best with one’s words and still being rejected are incredibly valuable and essential things. Debate is a powerful pedagogical tool because it highlights, sometimes starkly, how incredibly helpless you are; how you are at the mercy of words and minds beyond your feeble agency to control.
We’ll see how the separate novice division goes at Cornell this weekend. I’m afraid for the students participating. The rhetoric of childhood has infected my novices already as they are excited for the chance to face people who are unskilled. Musashi, wherever he is, is shaking his head. Perhaps it will turn out well, but I am not hopeful. Grafting the practices of one rhetoric game on top of another needs to be done more critically. But I go to Cornell in the spirit of experimentation.
Comments
5 responses to “Romancing the Novice”
Pt 1 – While I think there are several valid points regarding the potential for "infantalization" in novice debate, I'm not sure if the comparison between BP and Cross-Ex on the East Coast is entirely apt. There are two significant differences between the formats of debate that I believe justify Novice for one, but not the other. First, Cross-Ex Debate is a jargon heavy form of debate. This is hinted at in the post, but I don't really think the "language immersion" aspect of the activity is captured in the analysis. Novice debate in policy is somewhat more like the ESL divisions in large international BP events – a recognition that there is less opportunity for fluency in the language of evaluation. Comparing someone at their first tournament in the "language" to some who has spoken it through 8 years of high school and college debate would not necessarily be comparing the ideas or the arguments. Novice divisions allow a more accurate assessment of what a first-year debater is doing well. BP has less of this jargon, and therefore the distinction between a first year debater and an eighth year debate is based on their mastery of language in general (and maybe effective POI skills), a gap that it makes less sense to separate for evaluation.
The second key difference is the nature of the Resolution for debate. Cross-ex debate, with its year long topic, rewards familiarity in a way that BP does not, with a resolution changing each debate. Additionally, the research requirement of CX (reading the research aloud in the debate), rewards the development of "backfiles" – previously done research that is applicable from year to year. A first year debater, even if they have access to a squad's "backfiles", does not have FAMILIARITY with the backfiles, and is at a strategic disadvantage because they may be able to identify a responsive argument in an open debate, but would not have the evidence per se. (For example, turning global warming and nuclear war impacts come to mind). As the BP community changes resolution each round, and as the particular circumstances of some perennial topics update with current events, a well-read first year debater in BP is not at the same disadvantage.
There are also practical applications of the "cult of the Policy Novice" that are ignored in the analysis. For many, novice is the training wheels division – the goal is always open debate. As a coach with many novices (and the defending Novice National Champion from Towson last year), our program "moves up" novices as fast as possible. Once a team has a successful (made elims) novice tournament or two, they are bumped up to JV, and sometimes Open. This superior competition makes them better debaters ultimately, and reinforces the goal of the "Open Divsion". Also, it should be noted that ANYONE can debate in the Open Division – hence, the name Open, not Varsity. One half of the novice national champs team spent last Spring getting kicked around in Open, which is probably why he was able to be the Novice National Champ.
Pt 2 – Conflicting with these pedagogical and competitive impulses to move up novices quickly and evaluate how far they actually came at the end of the year is a competing incentive to maintain a large successful novice pool for the whole year – the "sweepstakes", or Points, system. Programs vying for Sweepstakes based awards are rewarded for dominating a division, and are incentivized to maintain successful novices in the novice division for the whole season. By "sweeping" awards, more points are accrued in national rankings, and programs use this a measure of the value of their team to justify expenses to administration. For a novice heavy team that may never win a "National" Championship (CEDA, NDT), this can be an excellent way to demonstrate program success. I would argue that this practice ultimately is what is undermining part of their open program going forward, but while I do not agree with the practice, I understand it from a program development model.
These conflicting methods of "coaching" a novice program in CX create certain tension that is responsible for some of the "innocence" preserved in Steve's analysis. However; I think that innocence is somewhat thwarted by the teams who do belong to the "move-up" model of programs – we are preparing debaters for Open and JV debates, and expect them to explore argumentation in line with that, often pushing the boundaries of what the CX activity is. Those argumentation strategies return the Open division argumentation back into the Novice National Championships at the end of the season, wrecking the illusion of that innocence to some degree.
These conflicting methods of "coaching" a novice program in CX create certain tension that is responsible for some of the "innocence" preserved in Steve's analysis. However; I think that innocence is somewhat thwarted by the teams who do belong to the "move-up" model of programs – we are preparing debaters for Open and JV debates, and expect them to explore argumentation in line with that, often pushing the boundaries of what the CX activity is. Those argumentation strategies return the Open division argumentation back into the Novice National Championships at the end of the season, wrecking the illusion of that innocence to some degree.
I can't imagine an argument made in BP at the "Open" level that would not also in some way be intuitive at the novice level. That's not how the activity works. Nor is the resolution consistent enough to ensure that if there are such distinctions, they are uniform through an entire tournament. The issue is not that CX Debate preserves the Novice distinction in its activity; the issue is that the BP community is simply trying to replicate an organizational order they are familiar with because of the overlap in coaching experience, and the uncritical assumption that "Novice" means the same thing across all debate. This is particularly silly given the impetus in part for the growth of BP in the east is avoiding those pesky research and jargon hurdles in the first place.
Pt 3 – A few other observations may also be relevant. APDA has a Novice Tournament usually at the start of the season, not a continual division. APDA recognizes that the first tournament or time debating is putting debaters at a disadvantage against experienced debates, and that experienced debaters need time to identify how to be student-judges. The APDA Novice addresses both these issues, then continues with the "regular" season. The reason I think APDA is right and the BP version is problematic is because there is not a high school circuit of parliamentary debate in the United States that gives a clear experience advantage in college debates. The general lack of prominence of the Parliamentary Debate at the Secondary school level means that most college parliamentary debater have at most 2-3 years of experience over first-years in the same format. This is significantly different than in Policy, where 4 years of high school experience can not only make you "fluent", but give you access to backfiles. That is why those with high school experience are not "novices" in college. (And JV is essentially the transition division, not a goal for anyone). I think the "backfile" analysis is given more merit when one looks at the designations of the High School Novice, JV, and Open divisions. In many states, you cannot be a novice, even in your first year of debate, if you are a junior in HS, because the discrepancy of "known" information is high. Also noting that the HS equivalent of the activity makes the same categorical distinctions explains much more about the college practices of CX debate. The reason that Novice is elevated in the way it is on the East is in direct relation to the way that opportunity to debate is greater across other states, makes college students more likely to have experience coming in. The East is an anomaly – many people who never had the chance to debate in high school, and a community that has adapted practices to address this population.
Ultimately, I am interested in how the idea of Novice evolves in BP, but I do not think that the CX community is necessarily the right model to follow because I believe there are valid reasons for the "novice" practice in BP that have no correlation in the BP community. I think rather than indicting the idea of Novice Debate in general, it would be more constructive to exam why the assumptions for CX do not translate to BP, and the underscore this to those coming from the CX model who have not critically considered why those practices are not equally applicable.
I like Vik's comment. Here's my response:
1. I think the comparison is apt in terms of the danger of actions meant well providing really dangerous pedagogy, such as the coddling of the novice subjectivity.
2. I am glad that programs opt out of these dangerous practices, and kudos to you for doing so. However, the opting out doesn't engage my argument about how the mainstream practice is bad. Glad you aren't a part of it; not an argument for preserving it. What's good about novice divisions outside the annual opener model of APDA or the 2 tournament self-imposed model of CUNY?
3. ESL/EFL is not a good comparison to policy because those divisions do debate teams in the open division, they are just compared against one another for purposes of the separate break. This is so they get practice debating those who are more fluent, or native speakers – which is the sort of practice they want anyway. I think functionally the divisions exist to hedge against the impossibility of evenly judging someone with a improper accent against someone with a proper one (regardless of how that propriety is determined; I am aware it changes based on geography). If novice divisions worked like this (as they often do in World's Style) I would be more in favor of them.
Tend to agree with you, Steve,
I think there's definitely a lot of value to be had from losing. The most important debate for Ian and me when we were in college was the third round at Vancouver worlds. We were just at the start of our second year, took two wins so went into one of the top rooms round three. To say that we were destroyed would be to put it lightly – all three of the other teams broke, 3 of the speakers were in the top 10. We were nowhere near them. That single experience taught us more than years’ worth of debating on the Irish circuit of with novices: that’s what we needed to get to if we really wanted to be competitive.
Kathleen Schulz has a wonderful book called Being Wrong where she dissects our approach to error and celebrates what it means to be wrong and how we learn and grow as people from it. Novice tournaments if there are too many of them give people too many excuses and opt-outs for being wrong, rather than forcing them to embrace it and learn from the experience. I think its symptomatic of the same trend of trying to prevent children from experiencing difficulty in early life, this article being the best example of why that’s terrible: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/how-to-land-your-kid-in-therapy/8555/
My abiding impression of my first trip into the weird world of American debating was that the presence of coaches meant that the debaters were less mature than their European counterparts. Myself, and the two guys that I was with on the Irish Times tour would often sit and converse with the coaches as equals, while they treated their debates of the same age or younger than us in an entirely different way. In Europe all the debating societies are student run, so are the tournaments, so is the tab. At 24, I’m decidedly in the dinosaur category. That has good and bad sides, but having seen things from both sides I couldn’t agree more with the need to treat young adults as exactly that.