While numerous studies on the relationship between argumentation and learning have been conducted in educational contexts with children, the sociocultural and dialogical perspective at the core of this symposium provides valuable theoretical and epistemological tools for examining argumentation and learning in everyday life across the lifespan with adults.
Drawing on a research project that investigates how societal crises are experienced in people's daily lives and narrated in diaries written over more than twenty years (Zittoun, Muller Mirza & Gillespie, 2022), our contribution offers a detailed analysis of two personal diaries. We adopt a dialogical approach to argumentation (Arcidiacono & Baucal, 2021; Grossen, 2015; Muller Mirza, 2024; Muller Mirza & Perret-Clermont, 2008) to highlight how two individuals, a man and a woman, through their writing, engage in argumentative dialogues with themselves (in a form of auto-dialogue) and with various other « voices » - including significant others in their family, friendship, or professional circles, political figures, the media of their time, and broader social "doxa".
For this analysis, we focus on the global societal crisis of COVID-19 in 2020, as well as on more personal crises that these individuals faced in their lives. We show that argumentative dynamics unfold across the life course in distinct ways, becoming intertwined with situations that carry particular meaning for the individuals, leading to decision-making, heightened awareness, and, in certain respects, forms of "learning".
This talk thus contributes to reflections on the role of argumentation in everyday life throughout the lifespan, within a sociocultural and dialogical perspective.