Thursday, April 25, 2024
In his 50 professional years, Tumbleweed has interviewed some true Texas characters and assembled the largest private collection of oral history in the United States. He writes a syndicated weekly newspaper column and teaches broadcasting at the university level.
Speech and debate are big deals at Howard Payne University in Brownwood.
” We’re one of the few colleges or universities in Texas or other states that guarantees scholarships for our competitors, “says Dr. Julie Welker, who heads up the university’s Department of Communication. “Our students must go through an audition process to be on our debate team.”
Julie coaches the speech and debate teams and last year was recognized as the Texas Intercollegiate Forensics Association Educator of The Year. She is a HPU grad and has taught there 22 years. She has been coaching the speech students since 2005. Her teams have been competing all over the nation and annually in Oxford, England. She recruits just like coaches of athletic teams. As a result, her students have won outstanding awards.
“Last year was an interesting year because of COVID. All our tournaments were online, which changed the atmosphere of each tournament. Instead of being in a room and having that face-to-face interaction they were all virtual. I was pleasantly surprised at how well the interaction occurred between the students and judges, too. However, the situation with the pandemic allowed us to compete at different schools in different parts of the U.S., which made us a lot stronger because each region has its own style of debate. We got some really great practice tournaments in and last fall we won the Texas Intercollegiate Forensic Association’s debate sweepstakes and overall sweepstakes, which was something that had never even done at Howard Payne. This past spring, we won debate sweepstakes overall and have done tremendously well on the national scale as well.”
The debate students have to be well versed in a variety of subjects.
“In the team debate the topic is announced and the participants are given just 15 minutes to prepare. Teams are assigned either affirmative or negative.”
Her students are involved in at least half a dozen tournaments every school year.
“For the past 11 years prior to COVID, we have been going to Oxford and competing. We hope to be able to go back soon depending on whether England is open to foreign travelers. Those events are not just open to undergraduates. They are open to schools all over the world and some students have eight years of eligibility. We are competing against students who are in PhD programs, law programs from Yale, Cambridge, Oxford, you know the biggest universities in the world. So, for our students to be able to compete in that arena, it’s a great experience. After the debate competition, we go to Parliament and watch debates in the House of Lords and the House of Commons. That’s where the style of debate we use originated. It’s just fun to watch and sometimes there are famous people there and that’s even more exciting. We do some sight-seeing, too. It’s just a great cultural experience for the students. They’re gregarious and meet people well. They are good ambassadors.”
