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By the Juris Education Interview Team
Douglas Roberts is the Director of Debate and Forensics and Assistant Professor of Communication at Missouri Valley College.
Currently, our team participates in Lincoln-Douglas, IPDA, TIPDA, and, when available, NPDA formats of debate. We occasionally also compete in discussion and congressional debate at our national tournament. We also participate in speech events such as Prose, Poetry, Drama Interpretation, Duo Interpretation, Program Oral Interpretation, Persuasion, Informative, Communication Analysis, After-Dinner Speaking, Impromptu, and Extemporaneous speeches.
The biggest real-world benefit students gain is the ability to think critically about everything. Students also develop strong communication skills, both oral and written, that will serve them well academically and professionally. I also feel that a critical takeaway students routinely report is that they learn how to advocate for themselves. These students no longer feel a dependence on others to take care of their needs but can better self-direct themselves to their life goals for being able to be successful.
My students will probably say the most challenging aspect is the sheer amount of workload. When students join the team for the first time, there is a lot that goes into preparing for their first debate, and it can be overwhelming because there are so many moving parts to being an effective debater. However, as those students say, it starts overwhelming, but they consistently have reported that the reward is incredible and worth every bit of the time. The most rewarding part of this activity is the voice it builds for a person. Most students at my current institution say the growth this has given them has allowed them to find their voice and allows them to truly critically think through complicated research to the level that they are no longer dependent on others to tell them what to think about that material. These students become independent thinkers who can analyze, interpret, and manage important information in a fast environment that makes them truly prepared for the very real world environment.
Public speaking is a skill that the more you do it, the better you get. However, just going into the public and giving a speech might help build confidence over the long run, but it won’t necessarily make you a better public speaker. Debating competitively incorporates a feedback aspect of what you are doing well and what needs to be improved. Meaning that through several debates, you build that comfort of speaking in front of others and have that extra layer of growth by learning how to do better, which produces incredible speakers.
Absolutely! Law school applicants have a lot of critical skills they can develop before they get to law school. I have heard debate jargon get used in courtrooms quite routinely, so knowing some of the jargon and what it means will make the transition easier. However, more importantly, debate prepares aspiring law school students for how to be on the opposite sides of their beliefs. How to defend something that seems impossible to defend. Such as the debate resolution “silence is consent.” This space allows a debater to work through different approaches and strategies but also gives them other perspectives that will be critical in being successful, because in law you will be handed the short end of the stick or handed a case that goes entirely against your own morals, but everyone is entitled to a defense and this activity offers a space to discover new ways and a deeper understanding of a wide variety of perspectives. Furthermore, debate prepares aspiring law students in how to effectively research, speak, and critically analyze arguments and materials.
Our team is still very young, but we have multiple members of the team who engage with our activity with the hope of becoming lawyers down the road. Several students see debate as a part of their preparation for law school. It is also common to see former debaters routinely use skills developed in their actual debates in court cases or learn case law through the research for a debate or speech they made in competition.
Debate is a magical experience. It can be nerve-wracking at first, and there is certainly that fear that you will say the wrong thing, but that is the thing about debate. Debate is the laboratory to try new things and make mistakes along the way. To learn what sticks in front of an experienced and an inexperienced audience, which will be the exact audience you experience in the courtroom. Competitive debate has long positioned itself as a game, and while there may be disagreements in the community about the implications of that meaning, the reality is that we are a high-level critical thinking game. This is the place that prepares you for the day that everything you have prepared for becomes not a game anymore. When the cases in the courtroom may well mean life or death for their clients. Debate prepares you for the day that it becomes real because that first day of true work gets a lot less scary when you have had time to refine the craft in a place that only seeks to help you grow along the way.
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