Educate through Debate. The Project "A suon di parole"

The paper introduces the educational project on the debate named "A suon di parole". It is a project that started in 2010 following a collaboration between the Faculty of Law of the University of Trento and IPRASE (Provincial Institute for Research and Educational experimentation of the Autonomous Province of Trento, Italy), and over the years the Cities of Trento and Rovereto subsequently joined. This collaborative project aims to develop, in a fun and competitive manner, the ability of high school students to argue and counter-argue. In a healthy debate intended to develop their logic, reasoning and critical thinking. To do this, debate tournaments have been organized, in which intellectual games were played, along with structured arguments and counter-arguments. As a result, it was observed how the dialectical confrontation, lived as a sporting competition, was able to promote in young people the desire and the capacity to compare their own reasoning with those of others in a manner that is not influenced by common teaching methods. Thus, through careful selection of themes for critical debate, an observation was made on how each student, regardless of his/her personal history, has had the opportunity to learn, understand, and, occasionally, change his/her beliefs through the dialectical confrontation with other students. Indeed, the purpose of the game was not to present pre-reasoned formulae to students in order to impose them as a specific way of thinking or speaking, but rather as ways of creating a game field where they are free to intellectually compete with each other. In order to develop the autonomy of students’ thinking and, at the same time, increase their integration and social cohesion, teaching took place through the experience of judicial debate in which two parties clash in a simulated court setting and not through lectures. In this way students approached the world of rules (legal, logical and ethical) through a kind of "trial game", thus developing the ability to support their ideas through the oppositional comparison which led us to suggest that the project has achieved its purpose.