Jul 06, 2023 At 12:10 PM EDT
Just as the summer kicked off, Chicago Debates, a member of the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues (NAUDL), hosted its first debate in Spanish to debut its new Debate en Español program.
Sonny Patel, the director of programs at Chicago Debates, said the role of the showcase was to "advertise what we have cooking" to stakeholders, including school administrators.
According to Patel, Chicago's Spanish-speaking population lives in areas that are heavily segregated.
"Those redlining scars are still here and so you have very, like, distinct areas that have largely Hispanic populations," he said.
Patel said the league is working on getting bilingual schools or high schools with a predominantly Spanish-speaking population to come on board. The first year will focus on scrimmages instead of proper tournaments among the Hispanic clusters across the city of Chicago.
The showcase was successful, Patel added, as some schools approached league representatives afterward to explain how many of their students who are immigrants or grew up in Spanish-speaking homes could benefit from this program.
There is at least one middle school confirmed and a few other schools in the process of confirming their own Debate en Español pilot programs for next year. Patel told Newsweek he thinks there is enough interest for Chicago Debates to get a proper Debate en Español league going.
Chicago would be the third NAUDL league to officially launch a Spanish-language debate program, along with the Boston Debate League (BDL) and the Minnesota Urban Debate League (MNUDL), with other leagues expressing interest in similar programs.
Several colleges have Spanish-language debate, but it is less common on the high school national circuit. The annual Harvard National High School Invitational Forensic Tournament, however, does have a Debate en Español event. This year, there were nine teams who competed online.
The Chicago showcase, held on May 11, featured four debaters from Solorio Academy High School who argued whether bilingual parents should teach Spanish as a first language to their children.
Patel said the new program would not "cannibalize" other Chicago Debates programs but would serve as an extension of their already robust programming to expand access and diversity in the debate space.
The Debate en Español program would be in a public forum format, which Patel said allows anyone, including parents and those without debate experience, to be able to sit in the room and understand what students are talking about.
For graduating senior Jairo Villalobos-Hernandez and rising seniors Santiago Leyva and Luis Aburto-Hernandez, Spanish is their first language and what they primarily speak at home.
As Spanish speakers and children of immigrants, these students said they are used to feeling like the "underdogs" in debate. Villalobos-Hernandez said that debate is much like the real world.
"The culture [of debate] is very much, for a lack of better wording, very white and more meant for wealthy people," he said. "Having to deal with an activity that is completely different from who I am is kind of a clash of cultures."
Leyva's parents frequently attended his soccer games, as they understood the sport well. But they never were able to connect with him over debate—until now.
Aburto-Hernandez had a similar experience, telling Newsweek that after years of English-language debate, this showcase was the first time his parents were able to see him in action. He said with the language change and the more audience-friendly format, his parents finally got to experience what he has spent the past few years doing.
"I was trying to give my parents an idea about what debate was," he said. "I think for that purpose, it went really well because I think they understood the basics."
Debate not only builds skills for students to learn civics, but creates a community of like-minded, motivated kids in a competitive space to push each other. Spanish-language debate opens up all of the benefits of debate—including advocacy, critical thinking and research skills—to a group of people who were previously shut out.
Villalobos-Hernandez said Spanish-language debate offers a sense of community and academic validation to many Spanish speakers who feel excluded or "ostracized" for their inability to speak fluent English.
"A lot of time, many students may be left out or treated differently because of their inability to speak English or their English is bad because they're learning English, and it is a struggle to be a part of clubs or certain communities because of that," he said. "So I feel like many people who are English second language or don't know English fully get very much left out of many activities. And that shouldn't be the case."
As Chicago launches its program, Patel said he worked with the BDL, which has been running a Debate en Español program for almost 10 years.
Roger Nix, the assistant director of after-school debate at the BDL, said a large portion of the participants in Debate en Español are immigrants whose schooling is mostly in English. He said the league's ultimate goal is to provide students with the skills to thrive in college and the workforce later in life.
"Our hope is that by staying involved in debate—and specifically doing it in Spanish—that students are able to grow their language skills beyond just conversational or what they might use at home but really feel like they can go into the workplace and engage in complex topics professionally as well in multiple languages," Nix said. "Which is a huge skill that would put them far ahead of a lot of other people."
Douglas Matute, the Debate en Español program manager at the BDL, is a product of Boston's Debate en Español program and now works for the league to expand Spanish-language debate for kids like him.
When he attended a bilingual high school in Boston, Matute said the program was an environment in which he could use Spanish to bolster his communication skills to improve his English.
"There's a lot of students who come to the country and they feel discouraged to participate in after-school activities because of the language barrier, but Debate en Español provides an environment for them to feel safe and communicate with their own language and have a sense of community and friendship," he said. "It's empowering."
Nix said Boston serves as a "proof of concept" for other leagues wanting to start their own Spanish-language debate program. He said the league shares its resources, evidence and lesson plans with other leagues to help them "get their own thing off the ground."
"We've shown that [Debate en Español students] can debate and access skills at the same level as students who can do so in English," he said. "A major hurdle with new programs is how do you build something out of nothing, so if we can provide resources and tell people how we do things and give them a model, then hopefully they can get off the ground on their own and grow them."
As Spanish-language debate programs expand across the NAUDL network, leagues hope to continue their cooperative work. At the end of the 2022-2023 school year, the Boston Debate en Español students flew to Minnesota to compete in an inter-league debate competition with other Spanish debaters.
But with more collaboration come more challenges.
"I think the biggest challenge with working with other leagues is we do things very differently," said Jenna Randerson of the MNUDL.
Each league uses different sources and evidence packets for students. For example, Boston translates topics and resources from the English-language debate packets, Chicago uses primarily Spanish-language sources and Minnesota surveys coaches and teams about what topics they want to debate, creating materials based off that interest.
But one common challenge for the leagues is finding qualified judges for Spanish-language debate competitions.
Patel said judges need to be trained on how to evaluate debate and provide good feedback. They must also be fluent in Spanish.
"And you know, there's not a lot of people in that Venn diagram," he said.
Randerson said she pushed for the MNUDL to pay judges, which helped bolster the pool. But in the wake of the COVID pandemic, the league lost almost its entire judge group.
"I think we had one judge come back from before the pandemic this year, but everybody else was brand new," she said. "So building that up again was really challenging."
NAUDL hosted a meeting recently between the Chicago, Boston and Minnesota leagues to discuss new Debate en Español programs.
Patel said the MNUDL led the discussion about its efforts to try to pilot a nationalized Spanish-language debate program and distributed a lot of case files and teacher training material to the other leagues.
NAUDL and the MNUDL also outlined their goals for a nationalized program: to create a space for heritage Spanish speakers, to recruit those who would not otherwise join debate, to grow Spanish-speaking skills and to make a pipeline for the National Speech & Debate Association, a nonprofit organization and leading national authority on speech and debate that provides resources, training and competitions.
While there was a "lack of consensus" on what the national format would look like, Patel said the Chicago league drew a lot of inspiration for its new program from Minnesota.
"They've been a wonderful watching point, and thanks to them, we didn't have to like reinvent the wheel," Patel said, adding that the Chicago league is taking things slow to start. "You can't start running, you have to walk before you can gallop."
Over the summer, Chicago Debates is developing its curriculum and outreach strategy with the goal of getting 150 students to interact with Debate en Español by the end of the 2023-2024 school year. The league is focused on Spanish speakers who are not already involved in debate.
He added that Chicago Public Schools will only give schools stipends for one debate team, meaning schools cannot have both English and Spanish debate programs.
Debate en Español would have different competition levels—"principiante," "avanzada" and "national"—which would model the novice, JV and varsity levels in English-language debate.
"The goal is to come out of this having some novices that want to go on to JV because once you get that, then you can start having like this flow of growth," Patel said. "Because the older kids can help cultivate, recruit and train the younger kids."
In Chicago, the students who debated at the showcase this spring are hopeful that they are part of something special that will build a legacy in the league.
Leyva said these programs will allow Spanish speakers to "keep improving as thinkers" and have "a better chance of succeeding in the future."
"In a couple of years when I come back [to the league], I want to see this as a platform where other kids have grown and, like, see myself in them because we're from the same community and we all speak Spanish," he said. "So just seeing a platform for other people to grow who might not have that opportunity is going to feel good, it's going to feel like we kind of started something."
While Chicago's Spanish-language debate program is just getting off the ground, Patel has high hopes for the impact the league can make in a community that often feels excluded from the conversation.
Patel said the ultimate goal of any debate league should be to promote civic discourse among young people. And that discourse, he added, "deserves to be in Spanish."
Correction 07/06/23, 11:30 a.m. ET: This article was updated to reflect the total number of participants at the debate showcase.
