From November 17-24, four high school students and two high school teachers traveled around 7,800 miles to Chengdu, China, for the International Sister Cities Debate Tournament.
Madeline Shinohara ‘28, Eesha Nachnani ‘28, Oren Schwartz ‘29, and Allen Chen ‘29, accompanied by history teacher Ayesha Nawaz and newly hired math teacher David Rudolph, arrived for the Chengdu-U.S. Sister Cities Youth Debate Challenge after over a day of travel.
James Lawson High School has represented Nashville at this tournament for the past three years; however, the team was unable to make the trip this year due to travel logistics complications.
Looking for someone to step in, Sister Cities of Nashville (SCN) reached out to USN with the opportunity.
Operating since 1990, SCN is a local organization whose mission is “to connect Nashvillians with people of the world, promoting peace through mutual understanding, respect, and cooperation.”
USN’s first Director of Experiential Learning, Kaylee Barbis, has a connection at SCN, whom she knew from her time at Templeton Academy, a school Barbis founded with a heavy focus on experiential learning.
“At Templeton, traveling was really important to us, like the city is a classroom. I think when a student can see that their experiences matter in a real-world context, it’s really powerful,” said Barbis.
Barbis was approached about the trip about two months before the students were supposed to depart.
“I went to [Head of High School Chai] Reddy, and was like, ‘Hey, do we want to do this?’ I knew Dr. Reddy also really values travel. When I came to USN, it was never a question of if we would travel again; it was always when we would travel again,” said Barbis.
This trip marks the high school’s first trip abroad since the summer of 2018.
The short notice of the trip left USN administrators scrambling to work out the logistics and left the debaters with a tight preparation schedule.
The complex preparation for the trip was compounded by the fact that this year, USN’s debate program has transitioned from policy debate to public forum.
“Both Eesha and I have been policy debaters for our entire high school careers. Public Forum and Policy are both forms of debate; however, they couldn’t be more different when it comes to strategy and presentation,” wrote Shinohara in a reflection on the trip. “Policy requires you to read as fast as possible to lay down as many different arguments as possible. Additionally, we use very specific language during rounds that can be confusing for newcomers… Public Forum, on the other hand, values a slow and clear presentation of arguments.”
This change posed early challenges for the debaters.
“We felt confused, as from a policy perspective we did very well, they felt like clean wins. However, we soon realized that we had to change how we presented our arguments,” explained Shinohara.
Following two losses in preliminary rounds, Shinohara and Nachnani bounced back, winning the next two rounds and qualifying for the quarterfinals.
While these competitive debates were the focal point of the trip, the cultural exchange with fellow debaters and the city of Chengdu will stick with the students for the rest of their lives.
Part of the trip included tours of local schools.
“I was surprised at how heartwarming and open the students were, and how they welcomed us into their school. I had been worried that putting Americans into a Chinese environment would ultimately make us feel left out, but the result turned out to contradict my thoughts,” wrote Chen.
At one school, the students were taught how to make dumplings, and bonded over on-the-spot Taylor Swift karaoke.
“The Chinese boy explained that Taylor Swift was also very popular in China, and he went on to ask if we would want to sing a song with him… This experience, undoubtedly sounding cheesy, truly facilitated friendships for many of us. It allowed us to be goofy and helped bridge a divide. Being on completely different continents can make us believe that we are very different, but by the end of the karaoke, many of us came to realize how truly similar we all are,” wrote Shinohara.
Students formed strong bonds despite the language gap that persisted throughout most of the trip.
“We, by the end of the trip, had worked out a system, a kind of fusion between translating apps, hand signals, much laughter, and schoolbook Chinese. This, far from subtracting from our communicational experiences, enhanced them. It felt like a quintessential part of the culture gap, and our work arounds felt like we were symbolically spanning it,” wrote Schwartz.
Barbis hopes this trip has set a precedent for future high school trips that serve not just as fun experiences but also as educational tools.
“We’re reframing, like, what does travel look like? I think we’re thinking about how to apply what we’re learning while we’re there. There are some cool classes in the works that we’re trying to think through how travel is part of the class so that students can actually apply what they are learning,” said Barbis.
“What was really awesome about this debate trip is that it wasn’t just a trip to China,” said Barbis, “It was actually a chance for those students to compete in an international competition.”
