Varsity Program
The Varsity program at PDI is an exciting, one-of-a-kind educational and debate experience. This program will provide a venue for experienced debaters to gain advanced instruction tailored to their individual needs. This program is designed for students with at least one year's worth of experience in debate and who are dedicated to making both themselves and the debate community of the highest caliber. The pedagogical philosophy behind PDI's varsity program is to master foundational debate skills that many varsity students lack while integrating advanced techniques into debaters common arsenal of strategies. The varsity program is meant for debaters who are dedicated to improving their performance at debate and are excited by the idea of overcoming existing weaknesses by turning them into strengths.
Highlights of this program include:
Highly Individualized Programming
Prior to arriving at camp, varsity students will submit extensive materials for review. Rather than simply ask students what they need or want to work on, PDI faculty will review past cases, common comments from judge ballots, answers to a LD quiz and draw on other sources of insight on prior debate performance to immediately and accurately work on areas of improvement with students. Lab leaders for varsity students will be extremely familiar with each student's level of debate performance before camp begins to maximize the student's benefit from camp.
Advanced Lectures
Varsity students will be offered a variety of advanced lectures at PDI that balance the individual needs of students, e.g. if many varsity students need work on impacting from their pre-camp evaluations, they will receive in-depth work on impacting. All varsity students will receive instruction and practice on universally important techniques to debating. A variety of lecture offerings will also guarantee that students attend the lectures they feel will benefit their educational growth best during camp. Potential topics include:
- Advanced Casing
- Advanced Standards
- Advanced Refutation
- Burdens
- Positional Debating
- Weighing Arguments in Every Speech
- How to Run Philosophy Properly
- Strategy & Persuasion
- Critical Thinking Drills
- Modern Political Theory
- Critical Theory
Varsity Elective: Leadership Track
For those varsity debaters who are passionate about debate and seek to return to their schools as leaders on their debate team in their community, PDI is offering a unique Leadership Track. This program will take time during camp to go over topics such as how to assist in the coaching of a team, how to attract new students to the team, how to be an effective debate captain and others. The purpose is to instill in experienced debaters the skills necessary to act as a leader on their teams and in their debate communities.
September-October 2008 LD Debate Preparation
As usual, PDI will be training all students at camp on the September-October 2008 LD topic. Because the camp begins after the topic release, our camp will allow all students to begin practice on the topic immediately and build a broader topic-specific knowledge base. Varsity students at camp will be given lectures directly related to the topic, assisted in their knowledge of the issues and become ready to debate immediately when the season begins. For example, in 2007 on the death penalty topic released during camp, students received topic specific instruction and different moral and political theories of punishment, as well as death penalty practices and law around the world.
Workshops
Lectures are valuable insofar as they can convert lecture knowledge into practical success. . For this reason, a majority of varsity students' time will be focused on interactive workshops where students practice the skills they are being taught and faculty members are able to appropriately critique them in the process. Rather than just hear an issue about how to critically examine arguments, debaters will work with faculty members side by side to deconstruct a case and identify the logical fallacies, hidden assumptions and unacceptable conclusions that they contain. Students will be asked challenging questions, including advanced critical thinking drills where students will evaluate logic premises.