About CARD

Collegiate Advocacy, Research, and Debate is both an organization for intercollegiate debate programs and a format of competitive debate rooted in evidence and advocacy, yet accessible, realistic, and enriching for a diversity of college students. The format is particularly geared for college students with limited prior debate experience. CARD has four major educational goals:

Debate Tournament Event Description:

Collegiate Advocacy Research & Debate (CARD) uses a format that seeks to produce a student-centered debate experience that is rooted in evidence and rigor and yet accessible and realistic for students with increasing demands on their time, resources, and attention. There are four major goals the format hopes to achieve. First, it seeks to immerse students in scholarly literature related to pressing social and political controversies. Second, it seeks to develop student skill in building, testing, and critiquing arguments synthesized from that literature and honing their ability to do so in front of a diversity of educated audiences. Third, it seeks to develop skills related to critical and strategic thinking. Finally, the format emphasizes the educational and social benefits of forensics through community-building and a deemphasis on some traditional facets of tournament debating.

The event utilizes a collectively sourced article library of scholarship that has been cultivated by participating students and coaches, traditional policy debate speech sequences with shorter times, and a communicatively centered theory of argumentation to guide debates. A full description of the event and its theoretical norms are located here. It is worth nothing that the norms described therein are not intended as a set of exhaustive rules that speak to what students may or may not do, but rather a set of aspirational norms that reflect the goals of the activity.

Resolution:

The CARD 2024-2025 resolution focuses on the issue of national climate policy mechanisms to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. The Viking Classic will use the most recent topic and library at the time of the event, published at https://www.westerndebateunion.org/topics

Article Library Details & Guidelines:

CARD debates utilize a collectively built community library as the sole sources of quotable evidence. The library, including links to full-text articles, can be located at: http://www.westerndebateunion.org/cardlibrary

Participants can utilize any portion of any article listed in the established article library.

Quick guide for CARD critics

A CARD critic is an educator, not merely an umpire fairly determining winners, because the CARD critic has two additional and more important responsibilities:

  1. Teach students how to improve their arguments and advocacy
  2. Nurture a learning environment that sustains student participation

ARGUMENT & ADVOCACY

The central question is whether a world with implementation of affirmative advocacy is better or worse than one without.

LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

The highest responsibility of debaters and critics is to create and maintain an enriching and welcoming educational environment that respects each person and encourages their participation and learning about argumentation, advocacy, and the topic. While this is a shared responsibility, critics, as educators, should judiciously intervene to help nurture such a learning environment. Successful CARD critics teach students how to improve their arguments and advocacy through quality feedback. CARD critics teach students where and how they should improve while helping them appreciate that it is in their capacity to improve. Poor critics leave students dejected, feeling unwelcome, or confused about how to improve.

CARD Speaker Category Descriptions

Evidence and Analysis

This category rates student performance related to the research and critical thinking throughout a debate. Students should demonstrate knowledge of topic issues and the skill of using evidence as a foundation for their arguments. Performance in this area goes beyond simply providing evidence in speeches. It also relates to skills in reasoning and evaluating arguments, such as explaining the connections between evidence and claims with one's own position, scrutinizing the merits of opposing arguments, and making evaluative judgments about arguments as the debate progresses.

Advocacy

This category rates student performance in the skill of advocacy, a specific form of oral communication. Students should be able to use communication to produce clarity and understanding for an audience, whether through their organization, explanations of arguments and their interactions (beyond simply presenting the initial argument), or translation of complex issues from scholarly literature. Effective advocates must also demonstrate skills related to persuasion, providing reasons to convince a critic that they have the better argument. Finally, success in this area should also demonstrate credibility and trustworthiness through consistency and fidelity to their arguments and communities they represent.

Community

This category rates student performance in building community in the activity. Students should work to build and strengthen human relationships throughout the debate round through their interactions with their partner, their opponents, and the judge. Actions throughout the debate should seek to nurture an atmosphere of respect and dignity for all persons. Community should not be confused with politeness or paternalism. Communities must also show respect for the significance of differences in identity, experience, and social power. Community is challenging to measure. When completing this category, judges should ask: how effective was the student at building bonds that bring participants into a community of arguers, even while disagreements and disputes are present?