SIMULATED PUBLIC ARGUMENT AS A PEDAGOGICAL PLAY ON WORLDS.

• Author: Mitchell, Gordon R.

The teacher sits at the head of the classroom, feeling pleased with herself and her class. The students are engaged in a heated debate. The very noise level reassures the teacher that the students are participating, taking responsibility for their own learning. Education is going on. The class is a success. But look again... On closer inspection, you notice that only a few students are participating in the debate; the majority of the class is sitting silently, maybe attentive but perhaps either indifferent or actively turned off. And the students who are arguing are not addressing the subtleties, nuances, or complexities of the points they are making or disputing. They do not have that luxury because they want to win the argument-so they must go for the most gross and dramatic statements they can muster. They will not concede an opponent's point, even if they can see its validity, because that would weaken their position. Anyone tempted to synthesize the varying views would not dare to do so because it would look like a "cop-out," an inability to take a stand.

-Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture (pp. 256-57)

In her recent book, sociolinguist Deborah Tannen provides this vignette from a debate held in Patricia Rosof's high school history class, to underscore the limitations of traditional "agonistic" and "adversarial" models of argument pedagogy. According to Tannen, the "ethic of aggression" (1998, p. 22) instilled through such teaching has resulted in widespread "slash and bum thinking" (p. 19) in educational contexts and the culture at large. Tannen spends much of her book chronicling the symptoms of this malaise: proliferation of war metaphors in public discourse, exclusion of women from deliberative spaces, and widespread citizen alienation from public life, to name a few. Tannen's objections to the zero-sum, either-or logic of typical debate training raise serious questions about the merits of traditional argument pedagogy. However, argumentation teachers will be pleased to note that in the end, Tannen is not entirely hostile to their craft. "My aim is not to put a stop to the adversarial paradigm, the doub ting game, debate-but to diversity," she writes in the conclusion of The Argument Culture;, "Like a well-balanced stock portfolio, we need more than one path to the goal we seek" (p. 276).

Rather than reading Tannen's book as a lethal indictment of adversarial debate models, it is more constructive to take her work as a cue to invent and refine new forms of teaching designed to supplement traditional methods of debate instruction. Indeed, this would appear to be a crucial task in the present environment, since it is a safe bet that in the coming years, there will be a growing need for schools to provide the necessary learning experiences for students to navigate their ways through the dense and complicated terrain of contemporary public arguments. It is likely that this need will intensify as the challenges of citizenship and political participation grow more complex in our era of rapid technological and social change. In the context of higher education, Gerard Delanty made this point recently, suggesting that "[u]niversities must recapture a sense of public commitment... [t]he university is an institution of the public sphere; it is not above civil society but a part of its cultural tradition , in particular it is a part of the public sphere and its tradition of debate and reflection" (1998, p. 22). This observation carries with it weighty pedagogical responsibilities, since the ripples of today's teaching efforts will undulate far into the future, as citizens draw upon their schooling experiences to shape their contributions to the public arguments of tomorrow.

Working toward development of argumentation pedagogies designed to complement traditional modes of debate teaching, in this essay, I explore role-play simulation as an exercise that promises to deliver uniquely valuable opportunities for learning about the dynamics of public argument. As an "active learning" strategy (see Brookfield 1987; Collard 1994; Eble 1988), role-play simulation is a classroom exercise that can break up the teacher's communication monopoly and flood the classroom with diverse and expressive rhetorical performances by students. The role-play technique also has unique potential to facilitate exploration of the many layers and perspectives embedded in public arguments that are sometimes obscured by either-or / yes-no debating formats. My exploration of this topic moves through four stages. A brief consideration of the history and dynamics of role-play pedagogy (in part one) gives way to discussion of the potential pedagogical benefits of role-play (in part two). The pitfalls and challenge s involved in role-play curriculum are then highlighted (in part three), setting the stage for reflection on ways to prove the pedagogical value of role-play to administrators and improve role-play curricular methods and classroom materials through teacher collaboration (in part four). Finally, concluding remarks will be offered about role-play's usefulness as a pedagogical device for cultivating acumen for citizens to participate powerfully in public arguments.

EXPLORING PUBLIC ARGUMENT THROUGH ROLE-PLAY PEDAGOGY

Many of the received approaches to pedagogy are not up to the task of energizing students to play positive roles as public deliberaters. Learning is difficult in settings where teachers monopolize the communication flow, and student silence is too often symptomatic of the lifeless and dull pedagogical space that is a frequent byproduct of top-down lessons. "Classrooms die as intellectual centers," according to Shor, "when they become delivery systems for lifeless bodies of knowledge" (1993, p. 25; see also Shor 1992). In such "passive learning" environments, students mechanically write down material but rarely reflect on it (see Brookfield 1987; deNeve and Heppner 1997; King 1993), with the quick evaporation of such ephemeral knowledge leaving students illprepared for practical encounters with interlocutors in actual public arguments. "In traditional classrooms, students develop authority-dependence," argues Shor; "[T]hey hear their futures as passive citizens and workers by learning that education means lis tening to teachers tell them what to do and what things mean" (1993, p. 29).

Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat This is the "banking" concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits... But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other (Freire 1970, p. 53).

Freire's alternative to the "banking" concept of education is a "dialogic" pedagogy, where mutually supportive and interactive communication stimulates learning on the part of students and teachers alike. "A dialogic relationship-communication and intercommunication among active subjects who are immune to the bureaucratization of their minds and open to discovery and knowing more," explains Freire, "is indispensable to knowledge" (1997, p. 99; see also Escobar et al. 1994; Freire 1990, 1970). Resisting the tendency to locate sources of knowledge in static canons of objective Truth, Freire points to interactive dialogue as the wellspring of curiosity and understanding in education.

There is a fundamental element in interaction, which takes on greater complexity in relationship. I am referring to curiosity, some sort of openness to comprehending what is in the orbit of the challenged being's sensibility. It is this human disposition to be surprised before people, what they do, say, seem like, before facts and phenomena, before beauty and ugliness, this unrefrainable need to understand in order to explain, to seek the reason for being of facts (1997, p. 94).

Despite the communication discipline's historical opposition to top-down learning, as Tannen's observations in The Argument Culture illustrate, debate pedagogy does not automatically encourage "dialogue" in the Freireian sense. While many argumentation teachers extricate their classrooms from the "banking" concept of education by using competitive policy debates to involve students, a different but profound set of pedagogical limitations attach to the traditional formats for such debates as recommended frequently in the standard argumentation textbooks. The adversarial nature of such debates injects a competitive (even combative) element into the classroom that tends to polarize discussion, penalize communicative cooperation, and alienate some students (see Crenshaw 1995; Fulkerson 1996; Gehrke 1998; Tannen). The formal rules of evidence and logic underpinning many models of debate pedagogy work to exclude and devalue arguments couched in emotional, affective, or aesthetic registers. These limitations presen t teachers with a challenge to enhance the pedagogical dynamism of debate by theorizing innovative formats and approaches that can more deeply fulfill the profound potential of debate education.

Simulated public argument represents a form of academic debate that promises to redeem more fully debate's potential as a method of "dialogic" learning. In the next section, I explore the basis for such optimism by sketching the historical roots and logistical dynamics of role-play as a classroom exercise. Since...