Moving from Debate to Dialogue with a Justice Talking Radio Broadcast

It was initially challenging for the students to decide on a topic.  They explored several possibilities, from the opening of ANWR to the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.  They eventually steered toward an issue that arose out of their course material, which at first seemed like it might be too esoteric.  Reassuringly, however, controversy seems to be a naturally occurring quality of engaged groups. 

From the very beginning, these students had found themselves in disagreement about how much they should weigh correctness and idiomatic usage when evaluating student writing.  In the Writing Center, where each of them works, they were being introduced to our deeply held disciplinary belief that correctness is overemphasized and that teaching “grammar” (as they incorrectly term it) is only tangential to good writing.  Yet many of them, having been taught these fundamentals all their lives, could not agree.  The discussion culminated in a full-fledged debate after an expert in Teaching English as a Second Language proposed that ESL students be evaluated on a different scale than native speakers.  It is nearly impossible for people who do not have prepositions in their native language to use English prepositions correctly.  Except through deep acculturation and practice -- and sometimes not even then – ESL students cannot learn “rules” for the use of prepositions, if such rules can even be articulated.  It seems nonsense to evaluate a person on failing to learn what is impossible to learn.  On the other hand, a native speaker can reasonably be expected to use prepositions in idiomatic ways. 

This debate irritates our assumptions about learning and asks us to examine some of our most deeply held beliefs about fairness, both of which tend to be largely unexamined by new writing teachers.  It proved to be an ideal topic that was genuinely contested within the group, with members tending to fall either into the “diehard standards” group or the “bleeding heart revisionists” group.  The beauty of the Justice Talking format, however, is that both groups – indeed, everyone in the class – had to work together to assemble the hour-long performance. 

This was not a “gather your sources and then debate” sort of exercise.  Rather, it was a composing exercise, where everyone had to step back and observe their contributions from the perspective of a listener.  Their goal was to construct a program that fairly and thoroughly discussed the issues, that allowed important voices to speak and that made room for listeners to contemplate the issues.

The class composed and designed several program segments: 

• Introduction, in which the importance of the issue was explained;
• Historical Background, in which the audience was acquainted with the history of the debate;
• Interviews with Experts, in which experts representing both “sides” of the issue were allowed to speak;
• Interviews with Laypersons, in which a group of nonexperts offered opinions;
• And finally a Debate, in which two perspectives were argued in calm, respectful tones, supported by evidence.

The students quickly discovered that it was nearly impossible to find a “diehard standards” expert; most composition experts reject the standards approach.  Laypersons, however, overwhelmingly advocated for it, especially ESL students, individuals whose first language was not English.  The process of producing a “show” together, as opposed to participating only in a debate, caused both sides to engage with their opponent in unfamiliar ways.  How do I make your argument sound good?  Students on one side provided information to students on the other side for the good of the final product.

Many students came to terms with the notion of a spectrum upon which this debate exists and came to problematize their earlier perspectives.  We all discovered that it is challenging to hold an extreme view in the presence of a sympathetic opponent, even though most students remained loyal to their “side” of the debate.  For us as teachers, it illustrates how much orchestration is required to have a meaningful difficult dialogue.  Engaging controversy shouldn’t be done in isolation.

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