QatarDebate Centre, a member of Qatar Foundation (QF), organised a virtual workshop for supporting and enhancing the debate skills of students at Dar Al-Huda Islamic University, India, recently through the Zoom platform.
The workshop, in which 47 young people participated, was part of the centre’s plans to train students on the basics of debating and raising the level of debaters at the university and its colleges in the southern Indian state of Kerala.
The trainees were divided into two groups, supervised by the trainers of the centre, Lotfi Baraka and Gaber Abu Hemid. The workshop focused on youth aged 17-23 years and the programme of the workshop included a number of skills and training activities on various debate issues and how to employ them in a correct way.
It also focused on the various methods of analysis and the tasks of the two teams within the debate through applications that enhanced the theoretical content of building the position of the parties and the argument and steps of refutation.
Baraka said, "What distinguishes the workshops that are offered to students in the Arabic language as it is a second or third language for them. It gives us a glimpse of the importance of the Arabic language as individuals from different countries of the world try to learn it. Not only that, they also want to debate and express their thoughts and opinions in Arabic.”
As for the students, their response and enthusiasm for the debate broke the barriers of lack of mastery of the language, as they were making great efforts to participate and express their opinions, giving the workshop a distinctive atmosphere.
At the end of the workshop, the students expressed happiness to learn new concepts related to the art of debate in the Arabic language, and asked for more workshops to be held in the future.
