Developing Kinesthetic Debate by Adding Metaphor, Embodiment, Multimodality, and Even Emotion

By: David Kluge

Editor’s comment: We covered all things debate in our November, 2024 issue, but our pundit on the topic, David Kluge, has found even more. He even links it to the brain science of metaphor!

Quote: “Knowing that the brain cut its developmental teeth in an overwhelmingly multisensory environment, you might hypothesize that its learning abilities are increasingly optimized the more multisensory the situation is. You might further hypothesize that the opposite is true: Learning is less effective in a unisensory situation. That is exactly what you find.” John Medina, Brain Rules

In the process of developing and using the two activities described below, I first approached them as just activities that I guessed would work because they required the students to stand up and move around. Later, as I got involved with neurolinguistic principles of embodiment and multimodality, I discovered why they worked as well as they did, and was able to gain a profound understanding of what to include while developing classroom materials. But my journey started with a linguistics class in college on the power of metaphors. Here is my story of two activities, Boxing and Brick Laying Plus as Debate and Roleplay Debate, and how I came to understand what I had tapped into as I developed them.

Metaphors to live by

While studying for a masters degree at San Francisco State University, I read Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (Lakoff, 1990) and Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) for a course, then hopped across the bay to Berkeley to listen to The Man (George Lakoff), and became hooked on the power of metaphors in the way we see and understand the world around us.

Embodiment

Fast forward through many years of teaching EFL to the point that I developed a metaphor that explained who I was and what I was doing with my career. After years of teaching and sometimes hitting a home run with one lesson and striking out with another the next day, I changed my image of myself. I saw that what I was doing when I was successful at teaching was more akin to what a physical education teacher does than what a science, technology, engineering, or mathematics teacher did. I was not “professing” content; I was developing skills within my students. I WAS A COACH! Later, I learned that it was embodiment that I was encouraging and embodiment that made an activity meaningful and therefore successful.

Multimodality

In the early 1970s, as a Theatre major at college, I especially liked watching and performing in Broadway musicals: the set, lighting, music, singing, moving, dancing—the emotions on stage that crescendoed until it reached a cathartic standing ovation. That was the way to live! That was the way to learn. It wasn’t until 2018 when I encountered the term “multimodality” that I understood why this was so. Multimodality posits that the more channels (visual, audio, tactile, kinesthetic, etc.) used to bring data to the brain, the stronger and more lasting the memory or lesson will be (Kinsbourne, 2003, p. 1; Medina, 2014, p. 171 ).

Putting them together

I realized that mixing together metaphors, embodiment, and multimodality was a good recipe for memorable teaching. These three elements came together for two interesting debate activities: “Boxing as Debate” and “Roleplay Debate.”

Boxing and brick laying plus as debate

I wrote in detail about this activity in 2013, so please refer to the JALT PIE SIG website in order to download and read the article. I wrote the article before I understood why the activity worked. Here I will just briefly describe the activity.

I first thought of the metaphor of debate as boxing, but I found that the metaphor did not fit exactly, so I added the metaphor of brick laying and then of moving in circles to indicate review. This is not exactly a clean 1-to-1 comparison.

In short, these are the main moves in a debate: 1. to build a position; 2. protect the position; 3. attack the opposite team’s position; 4. rebuild own position after attack; 5. review the arguments to show why your team won the point or won the debate.

These are the corresponding actions:

Debate Move	Action
1. Build a position	Lay bricks to simulate building something
2. Protect the position	Boxing Guard stance
3. Attack the opposite team’s position	Boxing punches (jab, straight, uppercut, hook/roundhouse, jab, etc.)
4. Rebuild own position after attack	Lay bricks to simulate building something
5. Review the arguments to show why your team won the point or won the debate	Move arms around in circles like a windmill to indicate going over something and then clasping hands like a champ who has won

Basic boxing moves and punches can be seen on boxing sites like this beginner’s guide to boxing by ExpertBoxing.com.

Steps with metaphors to autonomy

Telling students about the debate moves or going through the actions once before debating isn’t enough. The following steps help familiarize students with the different debate moves:

- The teacher calls the debate move and the students do the action.
- The teacher calls the debate move and the students repeat after the teacher and then do the action.
- The students call the debate move and then do the action.
- In a mock debate, as the students start doing the move, they do the action.

This way, if the student forgets what to do, the teacher just needs to silently do the action, and the student does the debate move but without the action. The autonomous “move + action” is due to embodiment helping the student remember what needs to be done at each step of the debate.

Here, the metaphors help the students embody the move, and multimodal learning also helps the students to remember how to debate. One caution is that it is a basic principle of debate that you debate the opposing side’s position and not the people on the opposing side. The metaphor of boxing could encourage the attacking of the other debater instead of the debater’s position.

Roleplay debate

I did not create the following activity but found it in my review of the debate literature. The activity is described by Collette Bennett (2019) on the website called ThoughtCo., but it is not clear whether she created the activity or found it. It is similar to one of Dorothy Heathcote’s Process Drama activities. Simply stated, in a roleplay debate, students do a roleplay about the issue where they explore different points of view. It can include as many people as necessary, with each person portraying a character with a different point of view.

An example roleplay could be: Should public schools hold face-to-face classes during the COVID pandemic?

Possible roles could be the following:

- Anti-vax Parent
- Pro-vax Parent
- Working Single Parent
- Pro-Face-to-Face Class Meeting Student
- Anti-Face-to-Face Class Meeting Student
- Teacher worried about the school becoming a COVID cluster
- School Principal, etc.

The teacher can call out “Lights, Camera, Action!” to start the roleplay. There is no script, so, before the roleplay, students can be given some time to think about what they want to say to stay in their role. At a natural break in the roleplay, the teacher can call “Cut!” It is important to discuss what they learned after the roleplay is over.

The metaphor is that the students are actors, and the classroom is not their usual classroom in this case. The actors are not passive but usually quite active as embodiment is taking place. The actors are receiving a wide variety of kinds of input, both explicit and implicit. The learning can be extremely memorable for these reasons. Another neurolinguistic factor might take place in this activity: emotion. John Medina’s sixth brain rule is “Emotion matters.” When the students become more emotionally attached to the activity, language skills improve, and, in class evaluations, students mention how memorable the activity was.

Conclusion

So far in my career, I have learned that mixing together metaphors, embodiment, and multimodality and adding a dash of emotion has been a good recipe for memorable teaching, especially when doing debate. Give it a try!

References

Bennett, C. (2019). 4 fast debate formats for the secondary classroom. ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/fast-debate-formats-for-the-classroom-8044
Expert Boxing (n.d.) https://expertboxing.com/the-beginners-guide-to-boxing
Kinsbourne. M. (2003). The multimodal mind: How the senses combine in the brain. Semoticon: Virtual Seminar. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237740636
Kiverstein, J., & Miller, M. (2015). The embodied brain: Towards a radical embodied cognitive neuroscience. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2015.00237
Kluge, D. (2013). Teaching debate to all students: Adding the physical element. Mask & Gavel, 2(2). JALT PIE SIG https://doi.org/10.37546/JALTSIG.PIE2.2-2
Lakoff, G. (1990). Women, fire, and dangerous things. University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.
Medina, J. (2014). Brain rules. Pear Press.

David Kluge ( Adjunct Professor, Chukyo University), was a letterman in running and a debater in high school. Although he started college as a Chemistry major/Mathematics minor in college, in his second year he changed to a Theatre/English double major. He is a founding officer of JALT’s CALL SIG and is the founder and president of JALT’s Performance in Education SIG.