ABSTRACT
In Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century (Louden, 2010), the working group on controversies in debate pedagogy outlined a disagreement over the role that the annual resolution should play in informing the practice of contest debating. In that essay, two competing perspectives on the role of a resolution are outlined for the reader. For traditional policy debate advocates, the annual resolution serves as a point of rhetorical stasis and argumentation proceeds from the resolution. For others, a critical perspective of debate portrays the contest as a site where competitors are not tethered to the resolution as the controlling focus for argument (Panetta & Mosley-Jensen, 2010). These competing visions of the role a resolution plays in debate often result in contests with little or no argumentative clash between teams.
