Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons^™

The Next 50 Years Of Forensics: Acknowledging Problems, Preparing Solutions, Christopher P. Outzen, Lucas J. Youngvorst, Daniel Cronn-Mills

Speaker & Gavel

In previous decades, forensics was a well-respected co-curricular activity, with students becoming involved as early as middle school and moving into colleges across the country. The activity provides a multitude of meanings for individuals, teams, and colleges across the nation conjuring feelings of friendship, community, education, leadership, and competition. Many within the forensic community know the reputation of this activity can be attributed to influential individuals such as Grace Walsh, L. E. Norton, and Larry Schnoor, among others. Despite the great past and present of this activity, the future is looming with potential pitfalls that could damage the activity. We …

Dsr-Tka: Reflective Thoughts, Larry Schnoor

Speaker & Gavel

When I was asked to write a short article about Delta Sigma Rho – Tau Kappa Alpha for the 50th anniversary issue of the Speaker and Gavel, I had no idea of how the project would bring so many memories. As with many former directors of forensic programs that were involved with DSR-TKA, I realized that when I had the opportunity to visit with some of them, we would have some memories we shared about a specific DSR-TKA national tournament. In doing some research for this article however, many additional memories came floating back into my mind.

Experiential Learning And The Basic Communication Course: A New Path To Assessing Forensic Learning Outcomes, Ben Walker

Speaker & Gavel

Scholars have often touted the educational benefits of forensics (e.g.: Bartanen, 1998; Beasley, 1979; Brownlee, 1979; Ehninger, 1952; Gartell, 1973; Jensen, 2008; McBath, 1975; Millsap, 1998; Schroeder & Schroeder, 1995; Stenger, 1999; Yaremchuk, 1979). Critics, most notably Burnett, Brand, and Meister (2003), have argued forensics is only a competitive game with the idea of education used as a crutch to uphold the activity in the eyes of schools. While attempting to counter critics, many forensic educators have scrambled to find proof of student learning. Besides theoretical approaches to potential learning methods (e.g., Dreibelbis & Gullifor, 1992; Friedley, 1992; Sellnow, Littlefield, …

Hosting A Tournament, Larry Schnoor, Ben Stewart

Speaker & Gavel

There comes a time in one's tenure as a Forensic Coach when one may think of hosting a tournament for various reasons. This can be a wonderful and meaningful experience for both you and the attending coaches and students, but it carries with it many challenges and a great deal of work. In trying to deal with what needs to be considered and planned in order to host a successful tournament, there are numerous elements that need to be given consideration. This article will at-tempt to provide you with guidelines and conditions to consider before one makes the final decision …

The First-Year Coach, Keith Bistodeau

Speaker & Gavel

The first year coaching a team is both exciting and terrifying. The first year coaching a team is your first taste of the career you may be doing for the rest of your life, on top of teaching, research, having a family, and having social life. Some of you reading this article may have a plethora of experience in forensics as a competitor, graduate student assistant, judge, sibling, or friend, while others may have no experience in forensics at all. Don’t worry; we have all been in your shoes in one way or another. This article is a checklist for …

Budget Considerations, Larry Schnoor

Speaker & Gavel

There are many responsibilities and duties for the director of forensics. One such responsibility that every coach will have to give very careful consideration and attention is the budget necessary for a sound forensic program. Yes, the question of funds is very important when one considers beginning and maintaining a sound forensic program in any college or university. We only have to look at how the events of the past few years have provided us with the evidence that our administrators are under the gun to tighten financial expenditures and in doing so, have begun to look closely at departments …

Judge Training: Judging Individual Events, Judging Parliamentary Debate, Judging Lincoln-Douglas Debate, Todd T. Holm, Justin Foote

Speaker & Gavel

This article provides a tournament di-rector with a self-contained judge training packet that can be copied and handed to judges or modified with your tournament specific information. This article ex-plains the mechanics of judging Individual Events, Parliamentary Debate, and Lincoln-Douglas Debate by providing lay judges with help in terms of how to express their thoughts about the event they just watched. The following material does not, nor should any judge training, mandate what is good or bad in a perfor-mance, but rather describes how to provide valuable feedback based on their ed-ucated reactions to the performances.

"It's Only A Hired": An Instructional Look At The Forensic Ballot, Kittie Grace

Speaker & Gavel

The judge’s ballot, within the forensic community, is used as an educational tool. Yet, the tool is often dismissed by the students it is designed to help (Choui-nard, 2010). College forensic competitors repeatedly discredit ballots, especially if they are written by a “hired,” or nontraditional, judge (Hanson, 1998b). Through a content analysis, this study identifies that ballots from both hired judges or non-traditional judges and traditional judges (coaches) provide “speech acts” that in-struct students about their performances (Austin, 1962, p. 5). This research looks at the specific speech act differences identified between nontraditional and tradi-tional judge messages. The analysis suggests …

(Re)Building A Team Culture, Todd T. Holm

Speaker & Gavel

The purpose of this article is to provide a director of forensics who wishes to rebuild a forensics program with advice, ideas, and guidance based on organiza-tional theory, organizational change research, and lived experience. This article approaches organizational culture as a dynamic construct of an organization. “Proponents of the perspective of culture as a dynamic construct are interested in both a better understanding of organizations through application of a cultural per-spective and a conscious development of organizational culture” (Sackmann, 1990, p. 133). This perspective treats culture as something an organization is and something an organization has. The shaping of forensics …

Copycat Forensics: How Social Learning Problematizes Intercollegiate Forensic Performances, Alyssa Reid

Speaker & Gavel

This paper highlights noticeable problems stemming from students adopting forensic norms without critiquing practice. Although many pedagogically sound reasons account for some structural similarities in events, many performance choices enacted in forensic competition are not grounded in educational principles but are learned and fostered through social learning. Currently, students can achieve forensic success without developing sound reasons for performance choices. Uncovering the ways in which students, judges, and coaches, produce and reproduce copycat performances can improve overall academic and competitive rigor.

The 2015 State Of Delta Sigma Rho-Tau Kappa Alpha, Ben Walker

Speaker & Gavel

Brief history and update of the Delta Sigma Rho-Tau Kappa Alpha organization.

This House Would Not Mix Burdens: The Conflation Of Fact, Value, And Policy In Npda, Crystal Lane Swift

Communication and Theater Association of Minnesota Journal

This paper explores the dispute in the forensic community over whether there is (or ought to be) a distinction between resolutions of fact, resolutions of value and resolutions of policy. This dispute is informed by philosophical literature on the subject in this paper. The philosophical positions are applied to the dispute in NPDA, and the author sides with the distinction rather than the collapse of the distinction. Theoretical, rhetorical, and pragmatic implications are drawn from the analysis, and pedagogical recommendations are made.

Dusting Off The Trophies: Filling The Gaps In The Forensics Collective Memory, Brian T. Taylor

Communication and Theater Association of Minnesota Journal

With any organization or group, certain areas, events, and individuals eventually become forgotten and left out of the collective memory. Forensics, at the institutional level, is no exception. This essay explores the concept of collective memory, with particular attention to how some areas are left out. It examines how and why certain areas of forensics history are lost, and the impact that has on the forensics community. Finally, it offers some suggestions for forensics educations on how to keep desired stories from being left out of the collective memory. Advice includes recording the stories in written or audio/visual format, bringing …

Sit, Stand, Speak: Examining The Perceptions Of The Basic Public Speaking Student On Normative Forensic Practices And Their Effect On Competitor Credibility In Oratory, Katie Marie Brunner

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

This paper examines basic public speaking students' perceptions forensic competitor credibility based on normative factors present within the forensic community. Anecdotal and experiential evidence provided this researcher with reason to believe that the unwritten rules and normative expectations of forensics were so far-removed from what students were used to seeing in their classrooms and in the media, that they could have a negative impact on a competitor's ethos, from the basic public speaking students' perspective. This research was performed in an attempt to determine whether these anecdotal and experiential assumptions were accurate and also to gain insight into the how …

Going Public: An Organizational Autoethnographic Exploration Of The International Public Debate Association, Adam Matthew Key

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Historically, a trend has been demonstrated in intercollegiate debate. Debate organizations begin with a focus on rhetoric aimed at a public audience and within an average of two decades devolve into a highly technical format marked by a high rate of speed, use of nuanced technical jargon, and an overreliance on evidence. The focus on competitive success, culture, and judges are examined as contributors to this trend. The International Public Debate Association was created to sociologically combat the excesses of its predecessors, though sixteen years after its creation it is beginning to show symptoms of the same disease that afflicted …

Remembering Arkansas Debate: The Use Of Collective Memory In Analyzing The Role Of Intercollegiate Debate At The University Of Arkansas, Barry John Regan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As one of the most successful organizations on campus for nearly a century, the University of Arkansas debate team created many memories and stories from their time in competition. According to the framework of collective memory, the production and dissemination of these stories is what connects the past, present, and future of a debate team together.

I first reconstruct the history of debate at universities, beginning with development of debate at the University of Cambridge and University of Oxford. I then detail the history of debate and argumentation at American universities, including the first intercollegiate debate in 1881. I then …

A Change In Competition: Assessing The Nfa-Ld Community And Its Views On Topical Counterplans, Matthew Whitman

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Intercollegiate academic debate allows students to participate in various contests and competitions to demonstrate expertise in argumentation and public speaking (Freeley & Steinberg 2009). The National Forensic Association's Lincoln-Douglas (NFA-LD) debate is a two-person style of policy-based debate, and it borrows much of its argumentative structure from other team-based debate organizations (Freeley & Steinberg, 2009). Yet it also prohibits other theoretical arguments from being used through its codified rules. This project seeks to examine current NFA-LD community attitudes towards the prohibition of topical counterplans, a theoretical negative argument, in the event.

Biological Sex As A Predictor Of Competitive Success In Intercollegiate Forensics, Kiranjeet Dhillon, April Larson

National Forensic Journal

This study examines biological sex as a predictor of the level of success in intercollegiate policy debate, impromptu speaking, and extemporaneous speaking. Secondary data analysis of tabulation sheets from NDT, AFA-NIET, and NFA, revealed three findings. First, there are more male than female competitors in policy debate and males significantly experienced more out-round success than females. Second, there are more males than females in impromptu speaking; however, there was no significance between biological sex and success in out-rounds. Third, there are more male than female competitors in extemporaneous speaking and males significantly experienced more out-round success than females.

After Dinner Speaking: Problems, Causes, And Still No Solutions, Brandi Lawless

National Forensic Journal

Since its adoption as a competitive event, After Dinner Speaking has been critiqued and criticized by several scholars. Despite the quantity of literature produced on this topic, changes to the event have been minimal. This author chooses to look at four areas of controversy including: defining the event, differentiating After Dinner Speaking from Speech to Entertain, differentiating After Dinner Speaking from other platform events, and developing a judging standard for this event. With the use of humor, this paper not only examines these problems, but also the need for discussion surrounding the pedagogical goals of After Dinner Speaking as a …

Perspectives On Individual Events: Proceedings Of The First Developmental Conference On Individual Events, Larry Schnoor, Vicki Karns

Proceedings of the National Developmental Conference on Individual Events

The First NDC-IE conference was held in Denver, Colorado in the summer of 1988. A total of 81 participants met for 3 days to regroup, reflect, and plan the future of forensics. By breaking into panel sessions for presentations and discussions the participants collaborated to reach consensus on guidelines for the future of the activity. The first NDC-IE included papers written on topics ranging from judge training to the role of graduate assistants to fostering better connections with high school programs to ethics in forensics. The conference concluded with a general business meeting where participants proposed resolutions for the forensics …

Complete Issue 45(4)

The Speaker of Tau Kappa Alpha

Complete digitized issue (volume 45, issue 4, May 1963) of The Speaker of Tau Kappa Alpha.

Complete Issue 45(4)

The Gavel of Delta Sigma Rho

Complete digitized issue (volume 45, issue 4, May 1963) of The Gavel of Delta Sigma Rho.

Complete Issue 45(3)

The Speaker of Tau Kappa Alpha

Complete digitized issue (volume 45, issue 3, March 1963) of The Speaker of Tau Kappa Alpha.

Complete Issue 45(3)

The Gavel of Delta Sigma Rho

Complete digitized issue (volume 45, issue 3, March 1963) of The Gavel of Delta Sigma Rho.

Complete Issue 45(2)

The Speaker of Tau Kappa Alpha

Complete digitized issue (volume 45, issue 2, January 1963) of The Speaker of Tau Kappa Alpha.

Complete Issue 45(2)

The Gavel of Delta Sigma Rho

Complete digitized issue (volume 45, issue 2, January 1963) of The Gavel of Delta Sigma Rho.

Complete Issue 45(1)

The Speaker of Tau Kappa Alpha

Complete digitized issue (volume 45, issue 1, November 1962) of The Speaker of Tau Kappa Alpha.

Complete Issue 45(1)

The Gavel of Delta Sigma Rho

Complete digitized issue (volume 45, issue 1, November 1962) of The Gavel of Delta Sigma Rho.

Complete Issue 44(4)

The Speaker of Tau Kappa Alpha

Complete digitized issue (volume 44, issue 4, May 1962) of The Speaker of Tau Kappa Alpha.

Complete Issue 44(4)

The Gavel of Delta Sigma Rho

Complete digitized issue (volume 44, issue 4, May 1962) of The Gavel of Delta Sigma Rho.