Among the various current threats to social cohesion and democracy, the increasingly polarised and distorted culture of public discourse – characterised, e.g., by populism, fake news or conspiracy narratives – can be regarded as major issue for an ethically and politically engaged foreign language teacher education.
Among the many methods established within CLT, 'debating' seems an obvious and very appropriate response to this issue, as its complex format offers opportunities not only for the practice of oral/rhetorical skills, but for an integrative advancement of communicative – and in particular: argumentative – competences. In addition, the method seems apt to pursue cross-curricular educational aims such as critical literacy education or education for democratic citizenship.
In this talk, we are going to reflect on the potential and possible pitfalls of debating as a teaching method in the foreign language classroom and raise questions regarding the integration of debating in an ethically and politically engaged foreign language teacher education. In line with critical pedagogy, we believe that one way to achieve this kind of teacher education is to allow students to go through processes of transformative Bildung (cf. Koller 2017), processes that are likely to be initiated by experiences of ambiguity and crisis.
Starting from initial experiences and preliminary results of the first cycle of a Berlin-based school development and teacher training project on debating (http://join-the-debate.info), we will discuss debating as an opportunity for transformative Bildung from our two individual viewpoints, shaped by our professional interests and research trajectories:
Katrin Schultze, whose research interests stretch from narrative identity to argumentation theory, speaks as co-coordinator of the debating project and as teacher educator in the Master of Education programme at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Anne Mihan speaks as a researcher and teacher educator dedicated to issues of race and gender in teacher education at Humboldt-Universität and in the EFL classroom, also bringing in her methodological expertise in critical community autoethnography.
Working with an example from Katrin's seminar, in which future English teachers analyse data from the debating school project, we will engage in a dialogue about assets and limitations of the debating method as an environment that requires students to rephrase, i.e. transform their own way of relating to the world and the self. We will suggest options for practising debating as a method characterised by a high degree of critical reflexivity, as part of a project of teaching and learning for social justice.
Reference:
Koller, Hans-Christoph (2017): Bildung as a Transformative Process. In: Laros, Anna, Fuhr, Thomas & Edward W. Taylor (eds.). Transformative Learning Meets Bildung: An International Exchange. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. 33-42.
