In the fall, I will be teaching my department’s graduate ecology course – a shift from my normal Intro Bio routine! I taught a section of the grad ecology course this past fall, but this coming fall will be my first time doing the whole thing.
One thing I’ve been wondering about is whether to have a debate in the course, where students are divided into groups and asked to argue in favor of a particular position. I have very little experience with this type of assignment (as either a student or instructor), and, sadly, have never seen one of the ASN meeting debates. I’d love to get feedback about possible debate topics and about how to structure the debate!
A key reason I started thinking about this type of assignment was seeing a few recent papers on the impact of wolves in Yellowstone, including this paper by Gable et al. and this paper by Hobbs et al., which was the focus of a recent feature in the NY Times. So, at the top of my list of ideas of debate ideas is: what was the impact of reintroducing wolves on Yellowstone, or, if framed more generally, what is the evidence that reintroducing top predators restores ecosystems? (I think I would leave it intentionally a bit vague.)
Once I started thinking about that more, I started to wonder if it would be helpful to have more than one debate topic, with students only taking part in one of the debates. One reason for that is there will probably be about 30 students in the class, and having 15 students on a side seems like a lot.
I mentioned this general idea to Brian and Jeremy, and Jeremy immediately suggested a great topic idea: are insect abundances declining due to human activities? A more general version of that could be: is there evidence for local biodiversity (that is, alpha diversity) declines?
Jeremy also brought up the idea of topics that are more about ecological methods or goals – for example, related to statistical machismo or whether ecology should be about general laws. I kind of like the idea of a debate topic that is about a specific ecological concept/topic (such as the impact of Yellowstone’s wolves) rather than on process of science things (which surprises me a little, because I generally love process of science stuff!)
Some of the things I’d love to hear are:
- Ideas for debate topics (especially for an ecology course aimed at first year grad students, but feel free to suggest topics for other types of courses, too!)
- Whether you think debates about specific ecological topics work better (or worse!) than ones about methods/goals/process of science.
- What size groups work best for in class debates, and whether it is interesting or boring/challenging if you have different groups assigned the same debate position/topic.
- Guidance that you give the students/debaters prior to the debate.
In my quick search for more about debates in science classrooms, I found this, which has some guidelines. Because I know very little about debates, it hadn’t occurred to me to possibly have rebuttals as part of the process (though I’ve listened to enough Smash Boom Best episodes on car rides with my kids that perhaps I should have thought of them!) I’m curious whether folks typically have rebuttals as part of the process? Thinking about rebuttals also made me realize that some debaters might want to include a verbal version of the ‘to be sure’ paragraph that is commonly recommended for OpEds, and that I recommend for manuscript discussions. My quick search also turned up this helpful resource from Northern Illinois University’s Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. I’d love tips on other resources that might be useful!
* The only assignment I can recall having along these lines as a student was in my ecology class, but that was more of a role-playing exercise than a debate. The general topic was whether wolves should be reintroduced to Yellowstone. I took that class in either 1998 or 1999, and wolves were reintroduced in 1995, so there must have been some nuance beyond that, but I don’t recall what it was. The only other part of it that I remember is that I was assigned the role of being someone involved with Defenders of Wildlife.
Dynamic Ecology 
Hi Meg
Good luck with this new venture in teaching! Switching from a large Intro Course to a smaller Grad Intro course is big!
One comment on the insect decline questions. The first is about abundance (counts of individuals) the second about biodiversity (the counts of kinds of species, traits, genes). I think they are both great questions, but the latter is not the more general case of the former, but, in most models, is a function of the former (biodiversity~abundance). This matters because “Are insects declining?” is fraught enough without identifying the key variables and how they are measured.
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There was one point last year where I taught the two classes back-to-back, which was exhausting but also sort of funny to go from the 100-level version of logistic growth to the grad level version within 10 minutes!
I completely agree that defining it more carefully matters, but I feel like some of the interesting part of the debate idea could be having students realize that both answers could be correct depending on how the question ends up defined more specifically. Typing that out, I’m realizing that one important thing will be to scaffold the assignment so that they get early feedback that will help them figure out that they should define things precisely early on. Do you agree that should help?
In grad classes I find that establishing definitions (and units!) at the outset is really helpful.
Peripheral, but here’s a related topic: When does abundance drive diversity, and when does diversity drive abundance? That could yield a lot of insights.
In my first PhD year we had a course on biodiversity conservation that did something like this, which I really enjoyed. Our instructor had us read Leung et al. (2020) as well as the four(!) replies to this that were published. Then, each student was assigned to one of the papers. Our task was to present the key arguments from our paper, and answer to responses of the other students based on the point of view of the authors of our assigned paper. Although this did not yet require us to develop our own arguments, it did help us to understand the intricacies of this scientific debate, and adding in the “role-playing” made it more fun and engaging.
I really like this idea! Thanks for sharing!
Interesting. My instinct would’ve been to have grad students do some background reading but with an eye to coming up with their own arguments. Rather than restricting them to summarizing someone else’s argument. But I’ve never done an exercise like this with grad students or undergrads, so perhaps my instincts aren’t the best.
In principle I would agree, but in this case, not all the students had a background in ecology, and so were quite new to the whole topic. In addition, this particular debate was very technical, with several arguments hinging on the details of the methodology of the original paper. So even those students who had a background in ecology may not have had the right methodological skillset to meaningfully develop their own arguments.
Overall, that debate was not just about introducing us to a current topic of controversy in ecology, but also about showing us how these debates are carried out, and the fine nuances on which the interpretation of data can depend.
(Even beyond that one debate, the course instructor was very good in helping us get to know some of the current debates in conservation biology. For every day of the course we had required reading, which always included papers with different perspectives on that day’s topic. This whole approach of “showing the disagreement” is one I found highly valuable.)
I think you could have a good debate about the topic of “Single Large or Several Small” protected areas in the context of 30×30 conservation. Should we (globally) be focusing our efforts on protecting the biggest areas we can, or protecting every little parcel that might be useful? I think there would be lots to explore in terms of how we measure conservation success (species diversity? biomass? genetic diversity? metapopulation connectivity?) and the role of humans in social-ecological systems.
I also suggested this debate topic to Meghan! Lenore Fahrig’s work would be good background reading/debate prep. Ok Meghan, now there are two votes for this topic! 🙂
Awesome! I recently heard a talk from Tom Letessier about this Science paper (https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.adi7562), which showed different responses in fish communities in benthic vs. pelagic MPAs. It’s been kind of stuck in my head ever since.
The ideas about impacts of wolf reintroduction and diversity declines seem like they could work well! I like that they provide the opportunity to connect ideas that first year graduate students might already know something about and care about to important ecological concepts and ideas. A couple more things that come to mind along these lines:
I also think this (‘Does evolutionary theory need a rethink?’) https://www.nature.com/articles/514161a could be a model for debates focused on theory. If you download the PDF you’ll see a nice side-by-side presentation of the yes and no sides in the ‘debate’.
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If you want a topic that includes “human dimensions” in a major way, the Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands offers layer upon layer of debatable ecological controversies. First, a little history: This is a natural area located in the province of Flavoland, a polder “won” from the IJsselmeer (“Lake IJssel”) by diking and draining. The IJsselmeer itself is artificial, having been created by diking the basin formerly known as the Zuiderzee (“South Sea”) in 1930s and allowing the IJssel River to flush out the saltwater and create a freshwater lake. As a result, not only was the aquatic system completely altered, and much of the seabed lost to poldering, but the economies of the fishing and shipping communities on the Zuiderzee were largely destroyed. This ecological catastrophe was created in response to a history of devastating storms and flooding around Zuiderzee, but also a desire for more arable, residential, and industrial land.
The area of the Flavopolder now called Oostvaardersplassen (“East Mariners Ponds”) remained too swampy to develop, and eventually began to vegetate itself and became an attractive area for migrating birds and some small terrestrial animals. Eventually people introduced herding animals, which multiplied beyond carrying capacity because there are no top predators (wolves are few and illegally hunted in NL, although present nextdoor in Germany). This resulted in massive winter die-offs, which in turn led to the government culling over 1,000 animals a few years ago (meat went to entities feeding the elderly, etc., I believe). Upset citizens increased the problem by throwing bales of hay over the fences in winter to prevent winter starvation, thus helping artificially increase herd numbers and thus pressure on the vegetation.
Other controversies have popped up there too, such as shooting foxes to protect ground-nesting waterbirds. Some folks call this an example of “rewilding”, but seem to forget that strictly speaking, rewilding would entail breaking the dikes and allowing return of seawater. In a hyper-managed system like the NL, what *is* nature, exactly? How much a part of nature are humans? Is this “natural area” worthy of the title? Etc, etc. The place is a delicious onion of debatable topics!
Another “human dimensions” idea would be debating climate doomerism. Hannah Ritchie’s new book, or an excerpt from it, could be one of the assigned readings: https://www.amazon.ca/Not-End-World-Generation-Sustainable/dp/031653675X
But this one might be too big and broad a topic to be usefully debated?
Re: number of debate topics vs. number of student groups vs. number of students per group: if it’s a small class, my instinct would be 2-3 students per group, 2 groups per debate topic (i.e. one group on each side of the debate), and have as many topics as needed for all the students to participate in one debate. I feel like it’d get boring and repetitive to repeat the same debate topic with multiple pairs of student groups. And I feel like having >3 students per group would be unwieldy and would create some risk of 1-2 students doing most of the work for the entire group.
My only worry would be that, if there are too many students in the class, you end up spending several class sessions on these debates. If it was a grad class that met, say, once/week for 2-3 hours, for 12-13 weeks in a semester, I’d probably want to do all the debates in 1 week, or 2 weeks at most. (Could definitely do multiple debates per class session if each class session was 2-3 hours long).
But I’ve never done an exercise like this in class, so I’m just guessing what would work best.
I have run debates in my undergrad ecology class a few times, and the students seem to enjoy them. We send out polls before and after the debates to see if students’ positions on a topic changed, and the team who changed the most minds getting some kind of recognition or simply ‘cred’.
Topics have included: ethical issues surrounding ‘rewildling’, ethics of releasing gene drives into wild populations, ethics of assisted evolution in conservation, relative merits/costs of solar farms/hydroelectric plants, conserving species vs. ecosystems, should wildfires be left to burn, etc.
We randomly form groups of around 6 students (though it could be smaller in a grad course). Each person speaks for 3 minutes. Half the speakers give the first set of arguments alternating between sides, then a short break, then the second half of each team delivers rebuttals. Sometimes it can heat up, mics get dropped, and you can really tell which students are studying drama or law. To make sure they’re on track, I ask them to hand in a list of references a couple weeks beforehand, and suggest papers that include scientific topics we have covered in class.
There are some ideas for different formats of discussions under the following link: https://teachingtools.uzh.ch/en/search (one has to search for “discussion”). The different suggestions also include information on group size.
Hi Meghan,
I’m not an ecologist, so my ideas tend to be more policy level topics. For example:
How do we interpret policies to use native plants in the face of climate change. For instance should we be actively planting selected species to the north of their traditional range?
Since I was part of the original Asilomar ASN debate on limits to species richness, I have run a similar debate in my upper level Global Biodiversity class for many years. Here’s how I structure it:
Assign reading: both of the original debate papers, Rabosky & Hurlbert and Harmon & Harrison. (I actually white out my name from the author line so that at least initially students don’t realize I’m an author, although some fraction of them figure it out given the within-paper citations).
Read more: Students read the debate papers fairly early in the semester, but don’t hold their own debate until 5 weeks later. In the intervening time, we cover lots of relevant material, e.g. species-area relationships, phylogenies and phylogenetic evidence, species invasions, etc.
Assign teams and roles: It’s a ~20 student class, so I assign two teams of 10 students. Each 10 student team has the following roles:
2 leaders/organizers that are in charge of scheduling group meetings, organizing notes, etc.
6 researchers, with the idea that different individuals might specialize in evidence in different arenas, e.g. fossil evidence, phylogenetic evidence, invasive species, etc.
2 speakers, who will actually speak and summarize arguments in class
Obviously 10 people is too many people for a “team”, and there are inevitable research slackers. I may try 4 teams of 5 students in the future.
Teams meet, work, and research: They are expected to meet as a group at least twice in advance of the debate, in addition to one (or one half) class period, as part of their preparation. Researchers compile their notes in a team GoogleDoc.
Debate: I used to do this all orally, with each side getting to present their case, and then each side getting to present a rebuttal or set of counterarguments. However, I found that there was a lot of the two sides talking past each other and not confronting directly each other’s strongest arguments (like the real debate!).
Thus, the past few times I switched to an online debate platform called Kialo (which has a free educator version https://www.kialo-edu.com/). This platform provides a neat way to visualize all of the pros and cons (or supporting and refuting evidence) for a given statement, and allows one to hierarchically nest supporting or refuting claims. In this way, if one side makes a good claim and the other side ignores it, it is more visually obvious. Hard to explain, but easier to just show an example.
So during class for the “debate”, students spend about 45 minutes frantically making points and counterpoints within the context of this platform related to areas they have become “experts” on, and then I leave 15-20 minutes for each team’s speakers to summarize the strongest arguments for their side.
Reflection: I poll students on their position on the debate after first reading the two debate papers (well before they’ve been assigned to a team), and then again after the debate. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, their positions tend to shift in favor of whichever team I randomly assigned them to. (But not all, and I am always happy to see some more critical, independent thinkers!) I ask them to write about which side they support and why, and what they find to be the weakest argument for their side (or strongest counterargument).
All in all, I think it is fun, gets them to realize that science isn’t just facts that everyone already agrees on, but is a process that involves logic, the interpretation of evidence, communication ability, and that there is always lots of room for disagreement.
Since you’re in Michigan, this might be a fun debate: was it the correct decision to rescue the Isle Royale wolf population?
A couple of thoughts from the scicomm corner of things, as well as my experience as a former high school debater (I did Lincoln-Douglas-style debate, not team debate; here’s info on the typical formats for each.
1. Unless there are very clear “rules of engagement” students can be expected to do what an earlier commenter said (talk past each other).
2. Arguing any position tends to entrench that position into people’s world views (we convince ourselves). So, I’d be careful with topic selection and with framing of the objectives, delivery, etc. Otherwise, it’s possible (maybe even likely) that students will come out of the experience convinced of their assigned POV, which is likely not your objective.
3. It is possible to slightly inoculate against point 2 by priming students with readings on how people make decisions, how emotions play into decision-making and beliefs, and how science is often weaponized/politicized rather than serving as a neutral “tool” in policy and personal decisions. I have a set of readings to this effect listed in my scicomm bibliography, and a top recommendation (though dated and longer) is Sarewitz’s 2004 paper How science makes environmental controversies worse. Another important one is The Oatmeal’s You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you. Students in my scicomm classes also report meaningful take-aways from The Cranky Uncle Game, which engages players in identifying several common types of science denialism and associated arguments/rhetorical strategies.
4. In other words, science-trained folks are as susceptible to confidence biases, channelized thinking, motivated reasoning, etc., as anyone. Debates can inadvertently reinforce our “worst habits” or they can highlight to students the ways in which scientists (and science writ large) have engaged in debate and close-mindedness throughout history. (e.g., historical debates around things like the Earth’s position in the universe on forward to more current debates). So, a session on the history of debates in ecology could be helpful scaffolding, too.
Thanks very much for this — I used to use debates in my graduate behavioral ecology classes and mostly stopped, for many of the reasons you list. The students have enough of a tendency to confuse style with substance as it is, so having them debate encouraged them to simply agree with whoever was more articulate. It also meant that they developed a kind of “po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to” attitude, where it didn’t really matter what the evidence said, both sides were always equally valid.
I also agree that it can be useful as long as it’s carefully done, though.
Thanks so much for that context, Marlene! Really interesting to hear those were active, persistent issues in your classroom.
This is a fascinating thread, and I appreciate all the links to resources on various ways to do debates.
I want to make a tangential comment relating to Meghan’s mention and link to a previous (2019) discussion about putting “to be sure” points in a Discussion section. It turns out that in the medical and social science literature, this is a standard thing. Not just a paragraph, but an entire subsection within the discussion labelled “Limitations”. It is typically followed by a series of paragraphs and responses to the possible limitations.
For example, in this recent paper in Journal of the American Medical Association
doi:10.1001/jama.2024.8391
the Limitations section contains paragraphs “First, the estimates rely on …”, “Second, fertility data are limited …”, “Third, results are based on model estimates…”, “Fourth, misclassification of racial and ethnic identity is possible…”
Each of these limitations is followed by either a reason for the limitation (data are not available), or comparison of the paper’s results to related results to suggest that the problem is not significant. In at least some of the papers I have been reading, the Limitations section is longer than the rest of the Discussion. It’s interesting how different disciplines have different traditions on things like this.