Wednesday 22 July 15:40
- 17:10
Hall: 13 - Room 10 SA
Chair and Presenter:
Iannaccone Antonio
Co-Chair:
Arcidiacono Francesco
Discussant:
Muller Mirza Nathalie
Division: Division 5: Education and School Psychology
By adopting a life-span development framework, this symposium addresses questions related to the role of argumentation in education, through the presentation of studies that examine the impact of argumentative activities in different learning contexts.
Contributors present qualitative data collected through systematic observations of various educational contexts (from preschool to secondary school). The presentations are characterized by a common dialogic and interactional perspective to illuminate how argumentation is built upon different characteristics depending not only from the explicit role assigned to it by the teacher, but also established by the socio-cognitive characteristics that define different modes of action and interaction in the human development. The adoption of an interactive and dialogical perspective (Arcidiacono & Bova, 2017; Muller Mirza & Buty, 2015; Muller Mirza & Perret-Clermont, 2009; Perret-Clermont et al., 2019; Schwarz & Baker, 2017) allows to define situations in which argumentation is developed through interpersonal dynamics characterizing learning activities.
In this sense, the five studies refer to argumentative situations as dialectical and intersubjective exchanges among people: it is the social and intersubjective matrix that makes argumentation suitable in various educational contexts, such as preschool settings (first contribution) or primary school (second paper) in which different semiotic resources contribute in promoting children's cognitive argumentation. Third and fourth studies consider argumentation, education and technology at secondary school level, to reflect on cultural dimensions necessary to build a genuinely cross-cultural theory of argumentative interaction in education. A final presentation presents a constructivist and dialogical approach to study argumentation, by highlighting insights of a lifelong learning perspective into how argumentation takes forms with social and cognitive skills that gradually emerge during ontogenesis.
All contributions support the idea of argumentation as an effective linguistic tool (in a Vygotskian sense) during social interactions, which can be then internalized to support individual cognitive activities (Iannaccone et al., 2019).
