ABOUT THE PUBLIC DEBATE PROGRAM
The Public Debate Program (PDP) is a national and international educational outreach initiative established by the Claremont Colleges Debate Union, centered at Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, California. The PDP is based on age-appropriate, educational and professional communication standards; designed to maximize student public speaking, research, argumentation, critical listening and thinking; and debate skill development.
Students may learn and apply PDP skills in across-the-curriculum programming. Teachers use PDP public speaking, argumentation, research, note taking, and refutation educational materials to integrate oral and written communication skills in class and homework exercises.
The PDP includes class and contest programming in 38 countries, with new and expanded Summer 2024 initiatives for more than 35,000 teachers and students in South Africa, Uganda, and Ethiopia.
The PDP also sponsors national and international debate championships, hosting middle school and high school national championships each spring and has also hosted a university championship tournament; and has twice sponsored the Pan American Debating Championship, the premiere international high school debate competition for countries throughout the Americas.
Our History . . .
Middle School Debate Program
The Middle School Public Debate Program (MSPDP), a program for students in 5th-8th grades (10-14 years) was founded by John Meany and Dr. Kate Shuster in 2000. Meany, a national champion intercollegiate debate coach and format innovator, is the Director of Forensics at Claremont McKenna College. He directs PDP strategic planning. Shuster, a former national champion intercollegiate debater, directs the Hard History Project and has served as the curriculum and evaluation manager for the Center for Antiracist Education.
High School Debate Program
Meany later developed the High School Public Debate Program (HSPDP) for students from 9th-12th grades (14-18 years) and the Youth Public Debate Program for primary students in 5th-6th grades (10-11 years). International PDP operations have included the International Public Debate Program (IPDP), featuring award-winning students representing the United States at the World Schools Debating Championship, Pan American Debating Championship, Eurasian Debating Championship, and debate tours and competitions and major completions in Europe, Asia, South America, and the United States.
Claremont Summer
For a quarter of a century, Claremont Summer has offered innovative and exceptional debate and communication leadership instructional sessions for middle school and high school students. Hundreds of students from the US and abroad (e.g., China, Germany, Jordan, Korea, Canada, Singapore, Kuwait, Mexico, France, Indonesia, United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, United Kingdom, India, Japan) attend each year. Claremont Summer offers a number of unique advantages:
John Meany | Founder
John Meany, a national champion intercollegiate debate coach and format innovator, is the Director of Forensics at Claremont McKenna College. He directs PDP strategic planning.
John Meany is the author of 15 debate textbooks for students from middle school through university debating, 5 of them as co-authors. These texts include Speak Out! Debate and Public Speaking in the Middle Grades (2005) and Speak Up! Debate and Public Speaking in High School (2015). These are written for the PDP and the latter text is appropriate for both middle school and high school debaters. Meany has other debate format textbooks, including the CHSSA high school parliamentary debate format (they founded this popular debate format for California), as well as the World Universities Debating Championship/British Parliamentary and National Parliamentary Debate Association formats.
Kate Shuster | Founder
In high school, college, and graduate school, Kate participated actively in intercollegiate policy debate as a competitor, coach and educator – in 1996, she was only the second woman to win the college national debate championship. For the next 20 years, she traveled the world building debate programs across the United States and in dozens of countries, training thousands of teachers, writing ten books and teaching at several universities.
Kate is the director of the Hard History Project, which works with archives and historical sites that collect and tell stories about race, racism, slavery, and settler colonialism and has been attached to multiple NEH, IMLS and NHPRC grants. For this, she became the Educational Director for Freedom on the Move, the world's largest archive of fugitive slave advertisements. She managed the Teaching Hard History initiative for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project and led an interdisciplinary team that created the world’s first K-12 framework for teaching the twin histories of slavery and settler colonialism and produced several short films and the Teaching Hard History podcast which has more than a million downloads.
Maya Kurkhill & Katie Na | Co-Presidents
Annual operations are managed by the Public Debate Program’s co-presidents, Maya Kurkhill (left) and Katie Na (right). They have worked as senior PDP staff for more than 7 years. Both are former outstanding, award-winning debaters, selected among the top 6 students to represent the US in international debate competitions. They have a long history of active involvement in PDP events, including tournament directors of the national middle school and high school championships, operations and residential directors of PDP summer institutes, and public speaking and debate workshop coordinators for teacher organizations and non-profit educational foundations.
They set the calendar and organize sponsored events, recruit new schools and coordinate leagues, manage school and personnel databases, host national and international teacher workshops, train tournament and tabulation directors, train event judges and civic and leadership staff, and serve as PDP contacts for returning and new members.
They are now working to update the PDP curriculum, including new instructional and operations guides for students, coaches, parents, judges, and tournament directors/managers.
