About
Claremont Summer involves debate training for middle school and high school students. Sponsored by the Claremont Colleges Debate Union, centered at Claremont McKenna College, programming includes pre-professional and professional public speaking, argumentation, and refutation skill development. Instruction is in small group, elective, and practice debate sessions. Programming accommodates new practitioners and highly experienced debaters. This is the 12th year of summer debate programming at Claremont.
ABOUT THE CLAREMONT COLLEGES DEBATE UNION – CCDU
The Debate Union is the largest college debating society in the nation and among its most successful. Students have won four national debate championships and received many hundreds of additional national and international debate and public speaking honors. The professional, public event, and outreach programs are without peer. The CCDU schedules about 40 tournaments and conferences each year. In the past several years, students have attended events in the United Kingdom, Canada, China, Korea, Germany, Ireland, Thailand, Turkey, Czech Republic, Botswana, Qatar, Philippines, Slovenia, and the United States. In the past few years, Claremont teams won or placed in the finals at a number of national and international events, including 55 round robin and invitational tournaments.
The CCDU sponsors more than 50 campus and community events each year, including debates, lectures, discussion panels, town hall meetings, broadcast productions, advocacy training seminars, international student/faculty exchanges, poetry slams, and other national and international community, interscholastic, and intercollegiate events. The Debate Union has sponsored a weekly public affairs cable television program, Uncommon Ground, organized the first poetry slam in Belgrade, coordinated a series of Presidential DebateWatches and Speak Out! programs—public open forums modeled on Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park. The CCDU has received national awards from debate and non-profit organizations for its public debate and discussion activities. In recent years, students participated in public events and workshops in Croatia, Slovakia, Korea, the United Kingdom, Peru, China, Slovenia, Italy, Turkey, Nigeria, Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Qatar, Russia, and the US. Working with campus and community political and social activist groups and non-profit organizations, the Debate Union prepares public speaking and debating instructional materials, trains speakers, produces documentary films, organizes online debates, and hosts conferences.
Through its educational outreach programs, the Debate Union is one of the world’s debate promotion leaders. The Debate Union developed and maintains the Public Debate Program, the largest and fastest-growing debate outreach network. The Public Debate Program offers debate class and contest programming for middle school and high school students (the Middle School Public Debate Program, MSPDP, and High School Public Debate Program, HSPDP). This year, the Debate Union will provide training for more than 80,000 middle and high school students from 42 states and 24 countries. All schools are welcome to participate in the PDP – a majority of participants represent socially and economically marginalized communities.
The Debate Union continues to expand the Middle School Public Debate Program and High School Public Debate Program. With its staff and partners, the CCDU has developed new leagues throughout the US and around the world, including 2012-13 leagues in New York, New Jersey, California, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi and international leagues in Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and China.
ABOUT CLAREMONT SUMMER
In its 12th year, Claremont Summer offers debate and communication leadership instructional sessions for middle school and high school students attending workshops as in-residence or commuting students. The 2013 summer programs include middle school debate instruction in the MSPDP format, national high school instruction in the HSPDP and CHSSA formats, international high school debate training in the WSDC format, high school auditions for prospective students for the official US international debate squad, and professional communication training for high school students, including extemporaneous speaking, resume building, essay writing, discussion, organization leadership, peer mentoring, PowerPoint and multimedia presentations, argumentation, social networking, and interviewing.
Compared with many summer debate and other academic enrichment programs, Claremont Summer offers a number of unique advantages:
Extraordinarily low student-staff ratio, 4-1, typically more than double the staff of other programs
Certification for all staff and judges – Claremont Summer is the only program that requires training and certification for all staff and judges working with students
Innovative educational design – the Claremont staff is responsible for the major developments in summer debate instructional methods for the past 3 decades; this includes exclusive small group instruction, elective sessions, open forums, research clinics, advanced team teaching, lesson planning/coordinated curricular development, program assessment, and integration of college admissions, college writing, professional communication and other college bridge and professional networking opportunities
Academic rigor – Claremont programming is organized and directed by the principals involved in major secondary school debate development in the past decade, including the founders of the Public Debate Program, the creators of the CHSSA parliamentary debate model, and the US representative on the World School Debating Council the organizational host of the international high school debate championship. John Meany and Kate Shuster developed the MSPDP and HSPDP formats; they created the California parliamentary debate format and worked with CHSSA to implement the design as a state event; they have organized and coached US international teams for the World Schools Debating Championship (Greece, Qatar, Scotland, South Africa, Turkey), the Pan American Debating Championship (US [host], Chile, Bermuda), Eurasian Debating Championship (Turkey), European Debating Championship (Czech Republic), Russell McVeagh International Round Robin and Debate Tour (New Zealand), and more. They have researched the elements of these and other debate formats, matched format elements to educational standards to maximize learning outcomes, designed evaluation rubrics, surveyed participants, and 
assessed programming. Claremont Summer programs are supported by a textbook and other text and video curricular materials authored by John Meany and Kate Shuster – Speak Out! Debate and Public Speaking in the Middle Grades (MSPDP), On That Point! An Introduction to Parliamentary Debating (CHSSA), How To Debate – Public Speaking and Critical Thinking Skills for Secondary School Students (Public Debate Program), Public Speaking, Effective Argumentation, and Professional Presentations (Communication Leadership), Teacher’s Guide to the Middle School Public Debate Program, Teacher’s Guide to the High School Public Debate Program, DVD Series for Secondary Debate Instruction – Four Debates: Ban Boxing!, Lower the Voting Age, Television is a Bad Influence, Abolish the Death Penalty, as well as a college/university parliamentary debate textbook, Art, Argument and Advocacy – Mastering Parliamentary Debate and 8 additional topic-specific debate textbooks and scores of additional age-appropriate resources. All summer workshop students receive textbook
and other curricular materials.
The summer debate and leadership programs are also FUN! There is time to meet new friends and optional and varied activities are included in the schedule– ice cream socials, pizza and movie nights, college pool visits, athletic fields and tennis and basketball courts adjacent to the dormitories, facility lounges have playing cards, board games, and snacks/beverages.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
John Meany, Director of Forensics at Claremont McKenna College and the administrator of the Claremont Colleges Debate Union, coordinates summer debate 
programming. He has directed and taught more than 150 summer debate workshop sessions in the US and abroad. He directs Claremont’s Public Debate Program debate outreach initiative, which includes the Middle School Public Debate Program (MSPDP), High School Public Debate Program (HSPDP), US – World Schools Debating Championship Program (US-WSDC), First Reporters! project, and Claremont Institute for Civic Leadership. He has coached five college national debate champions.
John Meany is the author or co-author of 9 debate textbooks and more than a score of teacher guides, research manuals and other debate instruction texts. He was a major sponsor of parliamentary debate formats (that is, debate formats featuring at least one element of parliamentary procedure, although parliamentary debate models may have no other common features) in the western US – he established and hosted the first college, high school, and middle school parliamentary debate tournaments in the western United States; his college teams have participated in the World Universities Debating Championship (international parliamentary debate model) since the 1980s; he established the US Universities Debate Championship (US championship in the international/WUDC parliamentary format – now the largest national college debate championship) and hosted the first 3 championship tournaments; he developed secondary school national championships for US and international teams in the MSPDP, HSPDP, and WSDC formats. He is a communication and debate consultant for higher education institutions, businesses, and non-profit organizations.
ABOUT CLAREMONT McKENNA COLLEGE AND THE CLAREMONT COLLEGES
The Claremont Colleges, consisting of five extraordinarily prestigious and highly selective undergraduate colleges (Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, Pitzer, Pomona, Scripps) and two graduate schools (Claremont Graduate University and the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences), are located 35 miles east of Los Angeles in the City of Claremont. The Fiske Guide to Colleges noted that the Claremont Consortium constituted “a collection of intellectual resources unmatched in America.”
The Debate Union and Claremont Summer programs are centered at Claremont McKenna College (CMC). US News & World Report ranks CMC among the nation’s top ten liberal arts colleges (10th) and most selective (6th). Forbes lists CMC as 12th among the nation’s best colleges. MediaBuzz noted three Claremont colleges among the nation’s Top 25 colleges and universities – CMC, 4th, Harvey Mudd, 5th, and Pomona, 6th. In an assessment of the ‘Happiest Colleges’ in the US, The Daily Beast ranked CMC 1st.Three other Claremont institutions ranked in the top 6 – Pomona, 3rd, Harvey Mudd, 5th, and Scripps, 6th (happiness based on student retention, amount of graduate indebtedness, availability of clubs and organizations, dining, housing, etc.)
Attending students have the opportunity to use the outstanding facilities and resources of some of the nation’s top higher education institutions during Claremont Summer debate programming.
