Announcing the 2013/14 Debate Topic and the First New-Topic Seminar

The 2013/14 national policy debate topic for both high school and middle school is being called Latin America:

Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its economic engagement toward Cuba, Mexico or Venezuela.

The National Federation of State High School Associations has a breakdown of the topic voting by state, and a link to the topic paper on Latin America.

We’ll be posting Latin America topic materials on the CDL site over the next two months, and will let you know when we have something substantial up.

This Saturday, April 27th, 10am – 12pm is the first student seminar on the new topic, presented by our partners at the University of Chicago, Rising Phoenix Debate, in Hyde Park.

This seminar will focus on Debater Development Benchmarks for year one and two debaters:

Introduction to the Topic
(19) Broad knowledge of the public policy context from which the topic comes

Introduction to Debate Research
(35) Techniques for electronic and library research, including the collection of cites from opponents, and from wikis
(36) Targeted research: researching for individual pieces of debate evidence

Register your interested debaters with Rising Phoenix Debate leader Carlos Penikis, carlos.penikis@gmail.com.