Fortians welcome back the return of face-to-face Debating Workshops in term 2

At the end of term 2, 2021, the pandemic hit and forced our entire school to move learning, online. After nearly 100 days of online learning, all classes resumed face-to-face learning in November 2021. One extra-curricular program however that continued online and did not return was Fort Street’s very popular Debating Workshops. After one year, the workshops finally returned to face-to-face at the Fort with a huge uptake of students from Year 7 to 10.

To accommodate for this increase, we also introduced a new group of debate coaches, many of whom were from Year 12 Fort Street students from 2021 and 2020. From the class of 2021 we have Meg Raven, Luca Butterworth, Danielle Villafana and Alejo Pintos-Lopez and from the class of 2020 we have Luca Charlier. We also have a new Head Debate Coach Gemma Taraneh Hedayati from the University of Sydney along with other highly experienced coaches including Alex Garman, Sam Trotter, Felicity Macourt and Mehnaaz Hossain.

Every Monday afternoon from 3.30pm to 5.00pm, students reported to their designated classroom to gain hands on debating experience. In these workshops, they learnt the craft of composing persuasive arguments and rebuttals that effectively responded to their oppositions case. They also had a go at debating against each other, on topics that reflected contentious issues in our Modern Australian society in 2022.

Earlier this term, all Year 7 to 10 students participated in challenging debate auditions where the coaches picked four winners to form each of Fort Street’s Year 7, 8 and 9/10 Premier’s Debating Challenge Teams. Another four students were chosen for each team to be reserves in case the main speaker was unavailable. As a result, the following students were chosen for the teams:

In the Year 7 PDC team, our main debaters are: Ollie Panagakis, Divyan Gnanasivam, Tom Mitchell and Jason Lim. In the reserve team we have: Joanna Park, Gabriel Cutcher Skellern, Oliver Wilson, Oliver Williams and Lucinda Man.

In the Year 8 PDC team, our main debaters are: Aidan Sen, Henry Huang, Aaditya Venkatraman and Aiden Lee. In the reserved team we have: Chinmay Dixit, Bhavnish Jain, Miranda Leighton, Aaron Ji and Lee Sheen Pong.

In the Year 9/10 PDC team, our main debaters are: Johnathan Bonnice, Chloe O’Keefe, Min Park and Gina Hong. In the reserved team we have: Eleanor Alonso Love, Galileo Lima, Ella Lo and Joyce Zhu.

In total we have eighty two Fortians from Year 7-12 involved in debating in 2022. Students are having an absolute amazing time with these face-to-face Debate Workshop in the last five weeks of Term 2 2022 and are just grateful that life can return, almost as we know it before the pandemic.

Ms. Truong

Debating and Public Speaking Coordinator for Fort Street