Supporting Emirati females leadership skills through teaching them how to debate: Design, assessment, and considerations

Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

International Journal of Management Education

Publication Date

7-1-2016

Abstract

© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. In response to the emerging need in the United Arab Emirates to empower young women and prepare them for future leadership tasks, a debate teaching intervention was organized in two phases at a public University in Dubai. During that intervention, 137 female Emirati students were taught the basics of debate and then participated in a debate session on a topic of general interest (Dubai EXPO 2020). Results show that participants observe a clear change in how they perceive themselves as leaders as a result of the intervention. Moreover, their leadership discourse as measured in terms of the persuasiveness of their expressed arguments at a group level was seen to improve more when the debate format followed had a formal structure than when it was flexible. Implications are discussed regarding the transformative learning function of debate as a training tool and its effect on leadership self-efficacy.

ISSN

1472-8117

Publisher

Elsevier Ltd

Volume

14

Issue

2

First Page

133

Last Page

145

Disciplines

Education

Keywords

Argument quality, Debate, Leadership education, Leadership self-efficacy, Persuasiveness, Women empowerment

Scopus ID

84962204126

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

no

Link to Full Text

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