The Seattle Debate Foundation announced yesterday it will launch the Tacoma Urban Debate League at three Tacoma high schools — Foss, Lincoln, and Mt. Tahoma.
The project will kick off tomorrow with a workshop from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at University of Puget Sound.
“We have always wanted to expand to Tacoma and make sure that Tacoma public schools had the same opportunities as our Seattle students,” said executive director Jen Johnson. “The funding and organizational capacity just wasn’t there until [we] formed new partnerships.”
Those partnerships include the Comcast Foundation, University of Puget Sound, the HERO Initiative at the College Success Foundation, Hip Hop Congress and Free Ya Mind Inc.
The debate portion workshops will be facilitated by college debaters from University of Puget Sound and University of Washington. In addition, these debate students will utilize Hip Hop and Spoken Word as a debate tool.
This week’s event will feature several debate workshops where students will learn hands-on debate activities that connect to students’ interests and foster critical thinking, reading comprehension, writing proficiency, public speaking, media literacy, conflict resolution, and civic participation. Workshop organizers expect to host over 100 students.
For more information, visit http://www.seattledebate.org .