In an era increasingly marked by polarized and unproductive political debates, this volume makes the case for a renewed emphasis on teaching speech and debate, both in and outside of the classroom. Speech and debate education leads students to better understand their First Amendment rights and the power of speaking. It teaches them to work together collaboratively to solve problems, and it encourages critical thinking, reasoned and fact-based argumentation, and respect for differing viewpoints in our increasingly diverse and global society. Highlighting the need for more emphasis on the ethics and skills of democratic deliberation, the contributors to this volume—leading scholars, teachers, and coaches in speech and debate programs around the country—offer new ideas for reinvigorating curricular and co-curricular speech and debate by recovering and reinventing their historical mission as civic education. Combining historical case studies, theoretical reflections, and reports on programs that utilize rhetorical pedagogies to educate for citizenship, Speech and Debate as Civic Education is a first-of-its-kind collection of the best ideas for reinventing and revitalizing the civic mission of speech and debate for a new generation of students. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Jenn Anderson, Michael D. Bartanen, Ann Crigler, Sara A. Mehltretter Drury, David A. Frank, G. Thomas Goodnight, Ronald Walter Greene, Taylor W. Hahn, Darrin Hicks, Edward A. Hinck, Jin Huang, Una Kimokeo-Goes, Rebecca A. Kuehl, Lorand Laskai, Tim Lewis, Robert S. Littlefield, Allan D. Louden, Paul E. Mabrey III, Jamie McKown, Gordon R. Mitchell, Catherine H. Palczewski, Angela G. Ray, Robert C. Rowland, Minhee Son, Sarah Stone Watt, Melissa Maxcy Wade, David Weeks, Carly S. Woods, and David Zarefsky.

In an era increasingly marked by polarized and unproductive political debates, this volume makes the case for a renewed emphasis on teaching speech and debate, both in and outside of the classroom. Speech and debate education leads students to better understand their First Amendment rights and the power of speaking. It teaches them to work together collaboratively to solve problems, and it encourages critical thinking, reasoned and fact-based argumentation, and respect for differing viewpoints in our increasingly diverse and global society. Highlighting the need for more emphasis on the ethics and skills of democratic deliberation, the contributors to this volume—leading scholars, teachers, and coaches in speech and debate programs around the country—offer new ideas for reinvigorating curricular and co-curricular speech and debate by recovering and reinventing their historical mission as civic education. Combining historical case studies, theoretical reflections, and reports on programs that utilize rhetorical pedagogies to educate for citizenship, Speech and Debate as Civic Education is a first-of-its-kind collection of the best ideas for reinventing and revitalizing the civic mission of speech and debate for a new generation of students. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Jenn Anderson, Michael D. Bartanen, Ann Crigler, Sara A. Mehltretter Drury, David A. Frank, G. Thomas Goodnight, Ronald Walter Greene, Taylor W. Hahn, Darrin Hicks, Edward A. Hinck, Jin Huang, Una Kimokeo-Goes, Rebecca A. Kuehl, Lorand Laskai, Tim Lewis, Robert S. Littlefield, Allan D. Louden, Paul E. Mabrey III, Jamie McKown, Gordon R. Mitchell, Catherine H. Palczewski, Angela G. Ray, Robert C. Rowland, Minhee Son, Sarah Stone Watt, Melissa Maxcy Wade, David Weeks, Carly S. Woods, and David Zarefsky.

Using primary sources from archives around the country, Democracy as Discussion traces the early history of the Speech field, the development of discussion as an alternative to debate, and the Deweyan, Progressive philosophy of discussion that swept the United States in the early twentieth century.

Citizenship has long been a central topic among educators, philosophers, and political theorists. Using the phrase “rhetorical citizenship” as a unifying perspective, Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation aims to develop an understanding of citizenship as a discursive phenomenon, arguing that discourse is not prefatory to real action but in many ways constitutive of civic engagement. To accomplish this, the book brings together, in a cross-disciplinary effort, contributions by scholars in fields that rarely intersect. For the most part, discussions of citizenship have focused on aspects that are central to the “liberal” tradition of social thought—that is, questions of the freedoms and rights of citizens and groups. This collection gives voice to a “republican” conception of citizenship. Seeing participation and debate as central to being a citizen, this tradition looks back to the Greek city-states and republican Rome. Citizenship, in this sense of the word, is rhetorical citizenship. Rhetoric is thus at the core of being a citizen. Aside from the editors, the contributors are John Adams, Paula Cossart, Jonas Gabrielsen, Jette Barnholdt Hansen, Kasper Møller Hansen, Sine Nørholm Just, Ildikó Kaposi, William Keith, Bart van Klink, Marie Lund Klujeff, Manfred Kraus, Oliver W. Lembcke, Berit von der Lippe, James McDonald, Niels Møller Nielsen, Tatiana Tatarchevskiy, Italo Testa, Georgia Warnke, Kristian Wedberg, and Stephen West.

"Robert Asen explores the ways that school board members in the U.S. engage each other to make decisions for their local communities. He addresses issues of ideology, scarcity, expertise, and trust while examining the perils and promise of local policymaking"--Provided by publisher.

"Don't talk to strangers" is the advice long given to children by parents of all classes and races. Today it has blossomed into a fundamental precept of civic education, reflecting interracial distrust, personal and political alienation, and a profound suspicion of others. In this powerful and eloquent essay, Danielle Allen, a 2002 MacArthur Fellow, takes this maxim back to Little Rock, rooting out the seeds of distrust to replace them with "a citizenship of political friendship." Returning to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 and to the famous photograph of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, being cursed by fellow "citizen" Hazel Bryan, Allen argues that we have yet to complete the transition to political friendship that this moment offered. By combining brief readings of philosophers and political theorists with personal reflections on race politics in Chicago, Allen proposes strikingly practical techniques of citizenship. These tools of political friendship, Allen contends, can help us become more trustworthy to others and overcome the fossilized distrust among us. Sacrifice is the key concept that bridges citizenship and trust, according to Allen. She uncovers the ordinary, daily sacrifices citizens make to keep democracy working—and offers methods for recognizing and reciprocating those sacrifices. Trenchant, incisive, and ultimately hopeful, Talking to Strangers is nothing less than a manifesto for a revitalized democratic citizenry.

Argumentation is often understood as a coherent set of Western theories, birthed in Athens and developing throughout the Roman period, the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment and Renaissance, and into the present century. Ideas have been nuanced, developed, and revised, but still the outline of argumentation theory has been recognizable for centuries, or so it has seemed to Western scholars. The 2019 Alta Conference on Argumentation (co-sponsored by the National Communication Association and the American Forensic Association) aimed to question the generality of these intellectual traditions. This resulting collection of essays deals with the possibility of having local theories of argument – local to a particular time, a particular kind of issue, a particular place, or a particular culture. Many of the papers argue for reconsidering basic ideas about arguing to represent the uniqueness of some moment or location of discourse. Other scholars are more comfortable with the Western traditions, and find them congenial to the analysis of arguments that originate in discernibly distinct circumstances. The papers represent different methodologies, cover the experiences of different nations at different times, examine varying sorts of argumentative events (speeches, court decisions, food choices, and sound), explore particular personal identities and the issues highlighted by them, and have different overall orientations to doing argumentation scholarship. Considered together, the essays do not generate one simple conclusion, but they stimulate reflection about the particularity or generality of the experience of arguing, and therefore the scope of our theories.

Spanning a historical period that begins with women’s exclusion from university debates and continues through their participation in coeducational intercollegiate competitions, Debating Women highlights the crucial role that debating organizations played as women sought to access the fruits of higher education in the United States and United Kingdom. Despite various obstacles, women transformed forests, parlors, dining rooms, ocean liners, classrooms, auditoriums, and prisons into vibrant spaces for ritual argument. There, they not only learned to speak eloquently and argue persuasively but also used debate to establish a legacy, explore difference, engage in intercultural encounter, and articulate themselves as citizens. These debaters engaged with the issues of the day, often performing, questioning, and occasionally refining norms of gender, race, class, and nation. In tracing their involvement in an activity at the heart of civic culture, Woods demonstrates that debating women have much to teach us about the ongoing potential for debate to move arguments, ideas, and people to new spaces.

The twenty-first century is characterized by the global circulation of cultures, norms, representations, discourses, and human rights claims; the arising conflicts require innovative understandings of decision making. Deliberative Acts develops a new, cogent theory of performative deliberation. Rather than conceiving deliberation within the familiar frameworks of persuasion, identification, or procedural democracy, it privileges speech acts and bodily enactments that constitute deliberation itself, reorienting deliberative theory toward the initiating moment of recognition, a moment in which interlocutors are positioned in relationship to each other and so may begin to construct a new lifeworld. By approaching human rights not as norms or laws, but as deliberative acts, Lyon conceives rights as relationships among people and as ongoing political and historical projects developing communal norms through global and cross-cultural interactions.

Growing numbers of scholars, practitioners, politicians, and citizens recognize the value of deliberative civic engagement processes that enable citizens and governments to come together in public spaces and engage in constructive dialogue, informed discussion, and decisive deliberation. This book seeks to fill a gap in empirical studies in deliberative democracy by studying the assembly of the Australian Citizens’ Parliament (ACP), which took place in Canberra on February 6–8, 2009. The ACP addressed the question “How can the Australian political system be strengthened to serve us better?” The ACP’s Canberra assembly is the first large-scale, face-to-face deliberative project to be completely audio-recorded and transcribed, enabling an unprecedented level of qualitative and quantitative assessment of participants’ actual spoken discourse. Each chapter reports on different research questions for different purposes to benefit different audiences. Combined, they exhibit how diverse modes of research focused on a single event can enhance both theoretical and practical knowledge about deliberative democracy.