Video transcript
The Arts Unit @home Art Bites – High school debate club 2

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Tony Davey: Hi all. Hope you're all staying well out there, staying safe and staying isolated. So,, this week, I thought we'd take a quick look at something that might help to improve your kind of basic arguments just a little bit and help you to come up with new arguments and make those arguments more believable. So, this week, we are just kind of take a very quick look at what a stakeholder is in a debate and different ways to use this idea of stakeholders to improve your arguments.

So, basically a stakeholder or a stakeholder group is just a group of people who have some interest in the outcome of the debate. It's a really, really, really annoying way of saying what groups of people are affected by this debate.

So, if it's a debate about the school system and education, the stakeholders are probably going to be the students, the teachers, the parents, possibly the wider community. So, it's just kind of about identifying the different groups who have a stake in the outcome of the debate.

So, whenever you get into prep, the first thing you should do is think your way through what groups are affected by this debate and try making a list of who those stakeholders are so that you can look back at it. Immediately, you might find that there are some extra arguments there that you can now be making.

So, you might in an education debate but not thought about what impact your plan might have on teachers or parents. And if you're struggling to come up with more arguments for why your idea is a good idea or why it's a bad idea, often looking at those neglected stakeholder groups and saying, oh, we don't have an argument yet about what this will mean for teachers, or we don't have an argument yet about how this will improve parents' life.

Oftentimes, that can help you to add an extra argument to your case and make your case more believable. So, that's a really simple thing you can do is just look at that list of the different groups involved and make sure you're having an argument about each and every one of them.

There are some better things that you can do, though. So, the next thing you should probably do is decide which one of the stakeholder groups is the most important. Sometimes, there'll be a clear winner. Sometimes, there'll be a number of stakeholder groups who are of equal importance.

Beginning to try to figure that out and make a decision for yourself because you're going to want to spend most of your time talking about the stakeholder group who is the most important in the debate.

The best way to do this is pretty simple. It's to think about both the size of the group, that's one reason why a group might be really important, or the size of the stake they have in the outcome of the debate. How big will the harms or benefits be to that group if the topic comes into effect?

So, you want to look at, first of all, how big the group is, and second of all, how much they have at stake in the topic. So, for instance, in education debates, the student group is easily the largest group. And we can say to ourselves, well, they're pretty important. And they're probably the ones with the most at stake.

Changing the syllabus or changing the school works just means teachers and parents have to adapt a little bit. For kids, it's about their future, whether or not they get a great job. So, they clearly are the most important group.

But it's not always the case that the biggest group has the most at stake. So, you've got to be more careful. Later about midweek, or no, towards the end of the week, one of our best coaches, Indigo, is going to rebut herself in a debate. I think the topic was that we should ban religious schools.

So, in Australia, the Christian schools are probably the largest stakeholder group that are going to be affected by that debate. But arguably, they have less at stake than the schools for smaller religions in Australia.

Because you can't get the kind of cultural education that comes along with going to a religious school if you are, for instance, Islamic or Jewish or any other religion other than Christianity by just heading down to the mall and enjoying things like Christmas and Easter that are kind of everywhere.

So, arguably, those colleges have more at stake, and they're more important stakeholders, than the Christian colleges, although you'd still want to make arguments about all of those different groups.

So, again, the question you're asking yourself is first of all, which is the biggest group? And second of all, which will see the most benefits or the most harms from this topic coming in? Often, you can just use your intuition as well. Honestly, in an education debate, you know that the most important group is going to be the students.

So, once you've figured out which is the most important, you can focus more of your arguments there. And another thing you can do that's really helpful is when you're making arguments about lesser stakeholder groups, try to remember to link back towards the end of those arguments to the main stakeholder group that you're concerned about.

So, when you're explaining your arguments, towards the end of those explanations, it's a good idea to wrap up by saying, here's why we think that's important, why that matters, what I've been talking about. And if your argument was about a smaller stakeholder group, try to point back to the impact you'll have on that most important stakeholder group.

So, if you're making an argument about teachers in an education debate, towards the end of that argument, you want to say, and this is really important. Because when those teachers' lives are improved, it kind of works its way through the entire classroom and ultimately has an impact on that most important group, the students.

If you're making an argument about sports stars in a debate about sport, clearly those well-paid sports stars aren't going to be the most important stakeholder group normally. They've got lots of money. They'll survive. And there's not very many of them.

So, if you're making an argument about them, you might want to finish up by talking about how important they are because of the way that they act as role models for that larger group, young people who are watching the sport. So, that's a really important thing you can do. Once you've figured out which stakeholder groups are the most important, then you can start to make sure you link back to them as often as possible

OK, so the other thing that you need to do is as you're talking about these stakeholder groups, you need to make sure that you're using that idea of importance to benefit your side of the debate. So, you want the debate to be fought about the stakeholder group that best suits your side of the debate. And that means constantly insisting on how important that group is.

During your rebuttal, for instance, you might say, look. I'll grant you that this might be kind of useful for this small group here. But we've already shown you this massive group will suffer. And they'll have suffered these kinds of benefits, whereas this group they've won on is a small group. And they're only going to get a marginal benefit anyway. So, you want to be arguing for the importance of the stakeholder group that best suits your side of the debate.

So, for instance, if they were arguing that this will happen to sports stars, and that will be really good, you can say, look, that's true. But that impact, that extra million dollars that someone on $10 million will earn, that's just not that big a deal. And there aren't many of them.

We're talking about the impact on those young people watching the game. And there are way more of them. And they're a much more important group because the impact on them is much bigger as well. So, you want to be arguing during the debate and showing the audience and the adjudicator that the stakeholder group you care most about is the group we should all be caring about.

Think about a debate about banning some form of gambling, for instance. The negative might say, we don't want to ban gambling. That would be unfair to those people who really enjoy it and have a lot of fun and aren't problem gamblers. And that's a pretty large group. But the stake they have in the debate is really pretty small because all that's going to happen to them is they won't have as much fun anymore. They'll have to have fun some other way.

If you're on the affirmative, you can say, look. We admit that problem gamblers are like a smaller group in the debate. But we've shown you that the impact on their lives will be much, much bigger. And that's why you should care more about what we've said, about fixing the problems of problem gamblers, than you should care about what they've said, about like helping average people have a little bit of fun on a Friday evening. So, that's one other way that you can use that question of which is the most important stakeholder group.

The next thing that's really useful with stakeholders is to start breaking up the groups you've come up with a little bit more. So, like in the religious schools debate, you don't want to just talk about religious schools and then the impact on regular government schools.

When you talk about religious schools, it'd be better to talk about Christian schools, Islamic colleges, Jewish colleges. Try to break up those groups a little bit more. Because honestly, the impact on each of them will be a little bit different.

If you're having a debate about sports, like we said before, you probably just don't want to talk about sports stars and everybody else and amateur sportspeople. You want to talk about those sports stars in terms of the highest paid sports stars, so what impact it might have on them. It's probably going to be very different to the impact on those less well-paid sports stars.

The reason you want to do this is it will make your arguments more believable. For instance, in debates about gender equality, it's really silly to just say we think people will react this way. You want to make that argument more believable by saying, this is how we think men will react. And this is how we think women will react. Your arguments will be more believable. Plus, of course, you'll have twice as many of them, which is good for being convincing.

But, the best thing you can do is to start breaking up those stakeholder groups in terms of the way that they're likely to react to the topic when it becomes law. So, you want to take your stakeholder group and kind of place it on a spectrum based on the kinds of reactions people are likely to have, the kinds of behaviours or motivations that are likely to change under the topic.

Take a debate about maybe punishing bullies more severely, some version of that topic. You probably already know that you're going to have an argument about bullies and an argument about victims. They're two obvious stakeholder groups.

But it might be better to split them up a little bit further and place them on a spectrum from like hardcore bullies with horrible things going on in their lives, people who are just picking on people because they think it's fun and cool, people who are bystanders who enjoy it, people who are bystanders who are uncomfortable but don't know what to do, and people who are victims.

Each one of those groups is going to have like a slightly different reaction to anything you do in terms of trying to police bullying. So, it's a good idea to split those groups up because then you can talk more believably about how they're going to react to the new rule.

Take a topic about regulating kids' behaviour or misbehaviour. If you had a topic like we should raise the drinking age to 21, which is obviously about kids' responsibility versus kids' rebelliousness, you might instead of just saying kids will react this way, which isn't that believable, you might talk about how really rebellious kids will react. Maybe they'll just ignore the ban.

You might talk about how at-risk kids will react that aren't rebellious, but there are kinds of people who can be talked into doing stupid things. You might talk about how average kids would react. And you might talk about how goody-two-shoes kids will react.

So, breaking up those different stakeholder groups into smaller and smaller groups based on how they will react will help you to make more believable arguments. And also, if you're struggling to make time in the debate, they'll just give you more to say and more reasons to believe you.

Lastly, when you're talking about each one of those groups, it's a really good idea to talk about what motivates them. So, in most debates, you're going to end up saying some version of, believe me. This group of people are going to react this way. And every time you do that, want you to think about trying to explain their motivations, what it is about their human nature that makes them want to behave that way.

So, you want to say, this group that I'm talking about, they're going to behave this way. And you can trust me, and then you'll point to an analogy and say, here's how this basic group has reacted into the past to something similar to this.

The different things that motivate people in debates tend to be, there's a pretty easy checklist. They tend to be being afraid is the first one. Being selfish and greedy, that's another thing that often motivates people in debates. Being altruistic and wanting the best for, say, your kids or for your community is another thing that often motivates people. And often plain old apathy, just being lazy often motivates people into making the easiest, least difficult choice.

So, you want to go through the different reasons people might be motivated, match them to those smaller stakeholder groups, and then say, look, here's proof that this person will react that way because they're part of this group. And we've shown you how they'll react in other situations.

A good example might be in that debate about rebellious kids and whether they'll change their mind if we raise the drinking age to 21. So, you might say, look. Those really rebellious kids will probably just continue with their rebellious behaviour. We've seen them break laws before. In fact, we've seen them break this very law about drinking under age.

So, there's no reason to think that they're going to change their behaviour. We think that they're going to stay exactly as they are. Because they're selfish, and they're greedy, and they're quite bad at thinking through situations. This next group of kids, the at-risk kids, and then you might talk about the kinds of choices they might make. What might motivate them to either drink more or drink less?

So, in summary, when you sit down and prep, begin by kind of figuring out what the main stakeholder groups in the debate are. Next, figure out if it's one that's more important than the others by looking at the size of the group and the size of the stake that they hold in the debate.

Next, make sure that your arguments on lesser stakeholder groups kind of link up as well to that largest stakeholder group that you care about. Because that will make those arguments more important.

And finally, start to break those large stakeholder groups up into smaller and smaller and smaller groups based on what will happen in the debate because that will mean that you can more believably talk about how they will react. And you'll convince the adjudicator and the audience much, much better. If you just say, kids will do this, we'll go, yeah, maybe. But aren't there lots of different kids?

Whereas if you say, hardcore bullies will do this, average bullies will do this, bystanders who think bullying is funny will do this, bystanders who are a little bit turned off by bullying but too scared to do anything about it will behave this way, victims will behave this way, by breaking it up into all those different groups, you'll find it much easier to make really good arguments about whether your plan is a good or a bad idea.

OK, so hopefully, that's a little bit helpful. Think about stakeholder groups in the debate. Think about which is the most important. And then think about breaking up those groups into like smaller and smaller and smaller groups so that you can say more and more believable things about how they're going to behave.

OK, so that's kind of all we wanted to tell you about those stakeholders. I suppose one last thing I'd say is that the word itself, stakeholder, doesn't really belong in any debate. It's kind of technical language. And I know that I've said during prep, you should go through and figure out who the stakeholder groups are.

That doesn't mean you should stand up and immediately list off those groups in a debate. It's a way to help make your arguments more effective. But you don't get any points just for saying the word stakeholder a whole lot.

Like I said, about midweek, we'll define a topic with you. I think we're going to define a topic about banning kids from social networking sites. And then later in the week, we'll have one of our best adjudicators practise rebuttal by rebutting herself. And you can see what that rebuttal looks like. Hope this was helpful. And yeah, talk to you soon with more debating tips.