INNOVATIVE AND INTERDISCIPLINARY TRAINING - STUDENTS LEARN THE ART OF DEBATING ABOUT HEALTH AND NUTRITION
The importance of public speaking and the ability to support your thesis with strong arguments are undeniable factors in achieving success. Medicine students, agricultural sciences students and economics students learn the “art of debate”, measuring their ability during a class debate on the use of “functional foods” and nutraceuticals in preventing and treating diseases. This multidisciplinary debate involves three groups of students with different backgrounds who confront each other on the same topic.
The first debate on health, held on Tuesday, May 24th, was greeted by a numerous audience and significant attention and, after this successful debut, more debates will come soon. In Anglo-Saxon universities the art of debate or "debate" has been taught for years, with great success. The techniques of the debate require great discipline, creativity skills, formal education, but also passion, fluency and commitment.
Public debates are becoming increasingly popular and the best Anglo-Saxon universities consider the debate an important educational tool, but also an opportunity for competition between students from different prestigious academic institutions. In recent years, a growing interest aimed at the rediscovery of the debate as an educational tool, has emerged also in Italy.
"The debate or 'debate' - as they call it- actually has its origins in the ancient art of rhetoric and discursive logic, which in Italy has almost completely disappeared from universities. It is a very effective educational tool to encourage the development of self-criticism, so as to educate students not to discriminate against other students because of their different opinions, how to persuade someone to accept differences and opinions, but also to learn how to defend your own view logically. The winner will be generally the one who got more information and data, analyzed the problem and, above all, who has been able to expose arguments with sharp logic", says Vincenzo Lionetti, professor of Anaesthesiology from Sant'Anna School, who announced the new training course on General Principles of Nutrition and Nutraceuticals.
"Each group of students - continues Vincenzo Lionetti- must be prepared to argue for and against nutraceuticals. The student engaged in the debate, namely the 'debater', will have a period of time to support arguments for and against. The groups ‘debating’ will be judged by a jury of professors of the School and the debate will be won by the students who have used better debating strategies, and not necessarily by those who proved to be right. It is an experimental educational approach that is performed for the first time at Sant'Anna School and I think even in Italy".
