Description
Book SynopsisScience 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.
Table of ContentsPreface 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
