Argumentative Interactions and the Social Construction of Knowledge
This chapter deals with two questions: firstly, what might students learn by engaging in argumentative interactions? And secondly, by what cognitive-interactive processes might they do so? An approach to understanding argumentative interactions, produced
- PDF / 228,774 Bytes
- 18 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 69 Downloads / 187 Views
Abstract This chapter deals with two questions: firstly, what might students learn by engaging in argumentative interactions? And secondly, by what cognitive-interactive processes might they do so? An approach to understanding argumentative interactions, produced in problem-solving situations, is outlined, that sees them essentially as attempts to solve an interlocutionary problem, i.e. that of deciding which putative problem solutions to accept or not, by drawing on additional knowledge sources (termed “(counter-) arguments”) that potentially change the degrees of acceptability of solutions. This process goes hand in hand with the exploration of a dialogical space and with the negotiation of the meaning of key notions, underlying the debate. The analysis of an example of argumentative interaction (involving two adolescent students in a physics classroom) reveals this exploratory process, together with the essentially unstable nature of students’ viewpoints, given that they are engaging in argumentation with respect to ideas that are still under co-construction. Keywords Collaboration, Argumentation, Learning, Problem-solving, Dialogue, Argumentation, Negotiation, Meaning, Conceptual change
1
Introduction
Life is full of problems that we cannot solve alone, either because we do not have the necessary abilities or because the problems necessarily concern others. An example of the first case would be my sending an SMS message on a portable telephone (I do not know how to do that without help, although I could possibly find out), and of the second, deciding on the acceptability of human cloning (this is a debate that should concern everyone, not just oneself). In both cases, one way of trying to solve a problem is to engage in dialogue with other people in order to coordi-
M. Baker LTCI laboratory, CNRS - Telecom ParisTech, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected]
N. Muller Mirza and A.-N. Perret-Clermont (eds.), Argumentation and Education: Theoretical Foundations and Practices, DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-98125-3_5, © Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009
127
128
M. Baker
nate ideas and efforts. But whilst proverbial wisdom says that “many hands make light work,” it also proposes the opposite, that “too many cooks spoil the broth.” In other words, solving practical problems with others can create another kind of problem – that I shall term interlocutionary, since it is concerned with relations between locutions, or utterances - due to the fact that there can be a diversity of proposals for solving the practical problem, not all of which can usually be accepted at the same time. Thus, an interlocutionary problem requires deciding, together, which solution, or combination of solutions, to accept to a practical problem. In fact, I shall now call such “practical” problems praxeological problems (Meyer 1982; Quignard 2000), they concern not only physical actions (such as those involved in mending a car) but more generally, problems that are embedded in social practices (such as deciding what ener
Data Loading...
