CA’s Nicholas Aranda Nurtures High-Stakes Conversations

As a student at a Texas high school, Nicholas Aranda never expected to go anywhere near the world of competitive speech and debate. “I thought it was this thing that nerds did,” he says.

But one October, at risk of earning a zero on a missed assignment in a required communications class, Aranda was offered a deal by the teacher: Fill in at an upcoming speech and debate competition, and get a passing grade for the work. He agreed.

“My parents were ecstatic when I told them I was going to a debate tournament instead of failing the assignment.”

The contract was fortuitous: Entering the West Texas A&M Guy P. Yates High School Speech and Debate Tournament as a novice in the Lincoln-Douglas event, a one-on-one format focusing on philosophical values like morality and justice, Aranda had “no idea” what he was doing—but he won the category anyway.

“I just fell in love with it; it was so much fun.”

 

Spurred on by that epiphany, Aranda debated all through high school, eventually receiving a full scholarship from Regis University in Denver to join its highly-regarded debate team, and gradually developed a rich network of debate connections here and around the world. His resume lists work with Harvard and Stanford forensics programs, a consulting role helping set up a Palestinian collegiate debate infrastructure in the West Bank, and an award-winning volunteer stint with the Denver Urban Debate League.

When one local debate colleague pointed him toward the Social Studies Department at Colorado Academy, he was intrigued enough to apply for a position, and now, this CA Upper School instructor is known not just for his track record as a debater, coach, and consultant, but also for his ability to nurture high-stakes conversations among students who are hungry to engage with big, global ideas.

 

“I’ve experienced a unique kind of ‘buy-in’ among young people in my three years at CA,” he explains. After a class discussion, during a one-on-one office conversation, or simply through a quick hallway exchange, Aranda says, “Students come to me with so many questions: What is going on right now in Gaza? Why did an American strike on Iran happen at the end of the day on a Friday?”

In competitive debate, continues Aranda, there’s an oft-repeated analogy: “When two sharp knives strike at each other effectively, the goal is not to dull each other; it is to sharpen both of them.”

And that is what he sees happening every day on the CA campus.

“I immediately fell in love with this place; everyone is so excited to be here. Our students have so many different ideas and opinions and voices, and we’re able to provide an environment where they can not only express those, but also hone them, refine them, polish them. In the CA community, students get to be around peers—and teachers, too—who elevate respect between opposing ideas.”

“Those high-stakes conversations don’t have to result in high-stakes tension,” observes Aranda. “We can still all go to lunch together afterward.”

Making the rounds

Debate may have brought Aranda to CA—where he joined English Instructor Dr. Jon Vogels to coach the school’s Speech & Debate Team—but it’s moments like Upper School lunch that keep him here.

Every week, he says, he schedules visits among the various student “pockets” that gather to eat in their preferred locations on campus: the Sophomores who sit in the Sculpture Garden, the Seniors who claim a spot near the Maloy Courtyard at Welborn House, the Ninth Graders who drink tea together on Friday. 

“I do my rounds at lunchtime just to say ‘hi’ and ask them how they’re doing, what they’re wondering about,” Aranda explains. “Interacting with students in these ways, particularly in the subject areas that interest me, you have the opportunity to see their minds blown all the time. I feel so fortunate—CA students are genuinely curious about the world and eager to learn more.”

It’s a dynamic that he doesn’t take for granted, he says. “Plenty of my students will someday enter fields that are directly related to the global topics we study. In my short time here, I’ve already taught three who went on to enter the United States service academies, and I take that very seriously.”

With dual undergraduate degrees from Regis in Political Philosophy and Peace & Conflict Studies, as well as a master’s from the A.Q. Miller School of Media, Communication, & Journalism at Kansas State University, Aranda possesses a vast toolkit from which to draw as he works to keep up with his students’ passion to be informed. 

“I’ve always found current events fascinating,” he recounts. “For at least 10 years, it’s been second nature for me to consume a huge range of news media daily.” Open-source intelligence is an area this amateur “war-watcher” has found especially engaging. “With the recent access ordinary people have gained to things like satellite data and imagery, open-source analysts have become just as vital in illuminating current conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine, as traditional intelligence organizations.”

Fortified with a constant feed of fact-checked news and intelligence from reputable sources, Aranda hosts a Github site where he publishes digital reference pages for his students, pulling together articles, data visualizations, and other materials on class topics such as Middle East history, American interventionism, and genocide.

 

The immense amount of work it takes to track emerging issues around the world—from Iran to AI in education—is “part and parcel of being a debate coach and being the kind of teacher I am.” Aranda works with CA students who specialize in the competitive event known as impromptu debate, where students must deliver arguments on randomly selected topics with little to no preparation. Coaching these competitors, he emphasizes, quite literally requires him to maintain a good grasp of almost any current topic in the news.

Likewise in the classroom: Most days begin with a quick discussion of online coverage about a current event, with Aranda prompting the students by asking, “What do you notice? What do you wonder?” In encouraging young learners to examine and question the layers of discourse that accumulate around key topics, he hopes to arm students for an age in which their social media feeds serve up a constant stream of headlines—with little in the moment to verify their accuracy.

“A lot of what I do in my classes is, in fact, about media literacy,” he acknowledges. “How do we do fact-finding, how do we all get on the same page about what’s really happening?”

Aranda was a graduate student in 2022 at the start of the Russian war in Ukraine, which was quickly dubbed the first “TikTok war,” just as Vietnam had been seen as the first televised “living-room war.”

“You couldn’t escape the news from Ukraine then, and our students can’t avoid the conflicts and crises that are happening now,” says Aranda. “But maybe with understanding, they can experience less of an emotional toll.”

Imagining the best arguments

One of the biggest taboos in competitive debate, Aranda notes, is saying anything to the effect of, “I just can’t understand that point of view,” or “I can’t wrap my head around that idea.” 

For this is precisely the challenge for any skilled debater. “Your job is to understand why someone would believe the way they do, even when it’s not something you yourself would personally believe.”

Despite sometimes being seen as organized one-upmanship with judges and an arcane scoring system, competitive debate, Aranda contends, is essentially about imagining an opponent’s very best argument for their own side, and then arguing against that. “Any old wahoo can beat a bad argument—there’s no sport in that.”

Rather than rewarding winning at the expense of understanding, he goes on, debate prizes curiosity, empathy, skill, and nuance—none of them the things that win online political fights or influencer opinion wars. 

It’s not much of a leap to wonder, isn’t this the power of education, too? 

When students come to him with a question about world events—What’s the “Donroe” Doctrine? Why did the United States arrest the leader of Venezuela?—Aranda says he never starts off wondering, “What answer can I give them?”

Instead, he says, his first thought is, “What sparks the question?”

 

In “switch-side” debate, the format for many of the events in which CA’s Speech & Debate Team participates, participants must be prepared to argue both the affirmative and the negative sides of any motion; their role is determined by coin toss. This requires debaters to be able not only to defend their given position, but also to identify possible flaws in their own thinking and the potential strengths of the opposing side.

Wondering what drives students’ questions is much the same: To the student who asked why the first large-scale attack in the war on Iran happened late on a Friday, after the close of financial markets, Aranda replied, “Let’s say you’re the Commander-in-Chief, and you have to make a decision. What is it about this region of the world that could make it difficult to strike while the stock markets are open?”

The student realized, of course, oil and Iran’s central place in the world’s energy supply were key.

“Asking, ‘What do you think you know?’ or ‘What did you see that made this question pressing right now?’ is a way to talk through the underlying ideas together, to get a sense of whether the inquiry is motivated by curiosity, fear, misinformation, or something else,” says Aranda. 

He adds, “I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a young person today. Living in the kind of world that you inherit, and as you come of age, being plugged into all these issues on your phone, learning how unstable the world is, how even some of the most outlandish things you hear may be true—it’s a challenge for anyone to navigate.”