Full Description
Science educators have come to recognize children's reasoning and problem solving skills as crucial ingredients of scientific literacy. As a consequence, there has been a concurrent, widespread emphasis on argumentation as a way of developing critical and creative minds. Argumentation has been of increasing interest in science education as a means of actively involving students in science and, thereby, as a means of promoting their learning, reasoning, and problem solving. Many approaches to teaching argumentation place primacy on teaching the structure of the argumentative genre prior to and at the beginning of participating in argumentation. Such an approach, however, is unlikely to succeed because to meaningfully learn the structure (grammar) of argumentation, one already needs to be competent in argumentation. This book offers a different approach to children's argumentation and reasoning based on dialogical relations, as the origin of internal dialogue (inner speech) and higher psychological functions. In this approach, argumentation first exists as dialogical relation, for participants who are in a dialogical relation with others, and who employ argumentation for the purpose of the dialogical relation. With the multimodality of dialogue, this approach expands argumentation into another level of physicality of thinking, reasoning, and problem solving in classrooms. By using empirical data from elementary classrooms, this book explains how argumentation emerges and develops in and from classroom interactions by focusing on thinking and reasoning through/in relations with others and the learning environment.
Contents
Preface
List of Figures and Tables
1 Argumentation Research in Science Education
Toulmin Argument Patterns
Dialogue and Presumptive Argumentation
Scientific Reasoning through Argumentation
Overview
2 Vygotsky's Spinozist Perspectives on Language
The Real Life of Language
From Meaning to Sense
The Sense-giving Contexture
The Lived World Indicated by the Sign
The System of Signs
Sign-use as an Expressive Act
Sign-use as a Communicative Act
The Communicative Act as Soliciting a Behavior
The In-order-to Motive and the Now, Here, and Thus of the Communicative Act
3 Children's Reasoning and Problem Solving
The Complexity of Young Children's Reasoning
What is Evidence?
Evidence in Nested Sense-giving Contexture
4 Argumentation as Joint Action
The Social Nature of the Word
Argumentation and Emergence
Laying the Garden Path in Walking
Individualizing Collective Claims and Evidence
Resolution of Contradictions and Emergence of New Trouble
The Social Nature of Argumentation
5 The Role of Physical Objects in Science Lessons
The Commonness and Difference of Physical Objects
Abstraction: What is Happening in the Real Event?
Physical Objects that Contribute to the Making of Sense
Learning with Physical Objects
6 Argumentation and Inscriptions
A Lesson Fragment
From Explaining an Observation to Warranting a Claim
Inscriptions in the Establishment of a Warrant
Opportunities Arising from Working on the Chalkboard
7 Argumentation and the Thinking Body
Position and Disposition
Thinking and Speech
Unity/Identity of Body and Mind
On Overcoming the Psychophysical Problem
8 Teaching Argumentation in Elementary Science
Attending to the Physicality of Argumentation
Pointing and Formulating
Being a Member of a Problem-Solving Community
Index
