Novice Directors Working Group Statement

[jpoapst]

Hello all,
I am posting this statement on topic wording construction and area choice on behalf of the Novice Directors Working Group.

Novice Directors Working Group Statement.

In support of making college policy debate accessible to as many students as possible, and in support of the health and growth of college policy debate, the novice directors working group recommends the following:

Teams should vote for topic wording that considers all three divisions of debate. Based on last year’s survey data and hours of conversation, we believe that novice friendly topics should be:
—Relatable – The topic should be an area that is accessible to new students, coaches, and university administrators while simultaneously encouraging educational growth and scholarship. A good topic will create pathways for new debaters to do future deeper research.
—Goldilocks – We should strive for topics that are neither too big nor too small.   Instead, the topic wording should allow for diverse but predictable affirmatives in the same direction balanced by sufficient negative ground which must include a topic-specific DA, not just elections/politics.
—Translatable – The topic should make sense to a layperson such as a novice, administrator, or the general public which could mean fewer limiting terms in favor of a mechanism that is a term of art or simple list.

Directors and coaches are products of our training and experiences. We all carry notions about topic size, ideal wordings. etc. A reminder that neither the premise that topics with 1-3 affs are best for novices nor the belief that novices need 7 or more affs to feel engaged were supported by any survey data we collected last year.

Support systems and tournament experiences were far more significant variables in determining who stays in debate and who leaves. The NDWG membership doesn’t view novice-friendly and open-appropriate topics as mutually exclusive.

If your program doesn’t have novices, these considerations should still matter to you. First, you’re impacted if you judge novice rounds during the year. Second and more importantly, although we have many different metrics for program success, we all need other schools to compete against. Novices matter to debate sustainability nationally. At a time when the fundamental role of university education is under a microscope, we do believe finding places where our self-interests intersect with growing this activity are increasingly important.

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