This book presents the historical, theoretical and empirical foundations of educational practices involving dialogue and argumentation.

During the last decade, argumentation has attracted growing attention as a means to elicit processes (linguistic, logical, dialogical, psychological, etc.) that can sustain or provoke reasoning and learning. Constituting an important dimension of daily life and of professional activities, argumentation plays a special role in democracies and is at the heart of philosophical reasoning and scientific inquiry. Argumentation, as such, requires specific intellectual and social skills. Hence, argumentation will have an increasing importance in education, both because it is a critical competence that has to be learned, and because argumentation can be used to foster learning in philosophy, history, sciences and in many other domains. Argumentation and Education answers these and other questions by providing both theoretical backgrounds, in psychology, education and theory of argumentation, and concrete examples of experiments and results in school contexts in a range of domains. It reports on existing innovative practices in education settings at various levels.

In the spirit of models of argument starting with inquiry, this book starts with a question: What might it mean to teach argument in ways that open up spaces for change—changes of mind, changes of practice and policy, changes in ways of talking and relating? The author explores teaching argument in ways that take into account the complexities and pluralities young people face as they attempt to enact local and global citizenship with others who may reasonably disagree. The focus is foremost on social action—the hard, hopeful work of finding productive ways forward in contexts where people need to work together across difference to get something worthwhile done.

This book focuses on how new pedagogical scenarios, task environments and communication tools within Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) environments can favour collaborative and productive confrontations of ideas, evidence, arguments and explanations, or arguing to learn. The first to assemble the work of internationally renowned scholars, this book will be of interest to researchers in education, psychology, computer science, communication and linguistic studies

The Most Reasonable Answer is an innovative and comprehensive guide to using inquiry dialogue--a type of text-based classroom discussion featuring big, contested questions that has been shown to improve higher-order thinking and argument literacy. Based on years of research and work in nearly fifty classrooms, the book supports teachers in facilitating this type of classroom talk in upper-elementary grades, when children are developmentally ready to practice making rigorous, reasoned arguments based on evidence--a critical life skill. Reznitskaya and Wilkinson introduce a robust Argumentation Rating Tool, a rubric highlighting eleven strategies and corresponding talk moves that can be used by teachers and students to improve the quality of their arguments by clarifying meaning, considering alternative perspectives, and connecting ideas. The authors also include annotated transcripts that illustrate how teachers can effectively facilitate whole-group and small-group discussions using fiction, nonfiction, and multimodal texts.--

Discusses about using technology to draw people into the kind of dialogues which take them beyond themselves into learning, thinking and creativity. This book reveals key characteristics of learning dialogues and demonstrates ways in which computers and networks can deepen, enrich and expand such dialogues.

Education is a main issue in all countries. Policy makers, educators, families, students and, in a more general way, societies expect schools to provide a high quality education. They also expect students to be able to achieve and to become active and critical citizens. As senior researchers in education, we address some of the most complex and demanding research questions: How does learning affect identity? How does participation to educational settings, scenarios and situations impact the way we are or became? Can changes in how we perceive our Selves be considered as part of the learning process? This book attempts to outline some answers to such broad questions using a very robust and updated theoretical frame: the dialogical approach. In these chapters very well-known international authors from different continents and countries analyze school and educational situations through new lens: by considering the teaching and learning processes as multi-voiced and socially complex and considering identity development as a true leverage for development. The focus on the dialogical nature of both learning and identities makes this book interesting not only for educators and educational researchers but also for anyone interested in human sciences, policy makers, students and their families. We also aimed at producing a book that can be useful for different cultures and educational systems. Thus, in this book there are researches and comments from different cultural perspectives, making it appealing for a very large target-public.

Considerable efforts have been made in developing and assessing educational technology to support and teach argumentation. These efforts have culminated in the form of techniques which include Intelligent Tutoring Systems and Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. Many of these techniques have been shown to be effective for specific argumentation domains. At the same time, the general design problem of how to support a learner's acquisition of argumentation skills through computer aided tools has not yet been perfected. This e-book presents a collection of current approaches in educational technologies for argumentation. Technological approaches underlying successful argumentation systems are presented, along with their relation to the success of these tools.

This book considers the emergence of dialectic out of the spirit of dialogue and traces the relation between the two. It moves from Plato, for whom dialectic is necessary to destroy incorrect theses and attain thinkable being, to Cusanus, to modern philosophers—Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher and Gadamer, for whom dialectic becomes the driving force behind the constitution of a rational philosophical system. Conceived as a logical enterprise, dialectic strives to liberate itself from dialogue, which it views as merely accidental and even disruptive of thought, in order to become a systematic or scientific method. The Cartesian autonomous and universal yet utterly monological and lonely subject requires dialectic alone to reason correctly, yet dialogue, despite its unfinalizable and interruptive nature, is what constitutes the human condition.

Educational researchers are bound to see this as a timely work. It brings together the work of leading experts in argumentation in science education. It presents research combining theoretical and empirical perspectives relevant for secondary science classrooms. Since the 1990s, argumentation studies have increased at a rapid pace, from stray papers to a wealth of research exploring ever more sophisticated issues. It is this fact that makes this volume so crucial.