The role of knowledge in participatory and pluralistic approaches to ESE

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to investigate in situ the functions that knowledge has when used by students in argumentative discussions. The study is based on Dewey’s pragmatic perspective of knowledge, which means that knowledge gets its meaning in the activity at hand. The analyses are conducted using Transactional Argumentation Analysis, which is a combination of pragmatic meaning analysis and Toulmin’s argument pattern. The empirical material consists of video-recorded lessons from two seminars in a Swedish upper secondary school. The results show that knowledge plays a crucial role in the discussions. Six different functions are identified: emphasising complexity, clarifying and correcting, highlighting conflicting interests, providing evidence in a counterargument, predicting the consequences and adding support to an earlier claim. Knowledge also has general functions, such as justifying a claim, and is part of a collective process aimed at understanding the issues discussed. Further, the students use knowledge from different disciplines, such as environmental studies, history, politics, biology and human geography.

Keywords:

• participatory ESE
• argumentation
• knowledge
• pragmatism
• practical epistemology

Notes

1. Previous research will be elaborated on in the next section.

2. We regard argumentative discussions as a specific practice in which students try to illustrate, prove or persuade that something is more relevant and reasonable than anything else. In this way, knowledge is used in combination with value-laden expressions (see also Nielsen 2012b). Further, in this study, we use the term ‘argument’ to describe the product the students create, and the term ‘argumentation’ to describe the process of creating these arguments (cf. Osborne, Erduran, and Simon 2004; Sampson and Clark 2008).

3. This pragmatic perspective has been developed in the research group SMED (Studies of Meaning-Making in Educational Discourses) in the field of didactics and educational science. The group is particularly interested in the question of learning and socialisation in a sociocultural perspective, inspired by pragmatism and the later works of Wittgenstein. The research focus is on individuals’ experiences, social processes and institutionalised traditions, and how these aspect are simultaneously involved in the processes and content of meaning-making (see for example Öhman and Östman 2007; Östman and Öhman 2010; Quennerstedt, Öhman, and Öhman 2011).

4. PEA has been developed by Wickman and Östman (Östman and Wickman 2001; Wickman and Östman 2001, 2002a, 2002b) in order to enable analyses of meaning-making in institutionalised practices. PEA is based on the pragmatic turn in analysing and understanding education (cf. Östman 1996): studies of practical epistemology, thus, focus on what makes a conversation or other actions take a certain direction and continue in a specific way and not in other possible ways (see further Lidar, Lundqvist, and Östman 2006; Wickman 2006, 53). PEA has earlier been used and developed for investigations of, for example, moral learning (Öhman 2008; Öhman and Östman 2007), teachers’ functions for students’ learning (Rudsberg and Öhman 2010; Lidar, Lundqvist, and Östman 2006), students’ learning in argumentative discussions (Rudsberg, Öhman, and Östman 2013), the role of artefacts for students’ learning (Almqvist and Östman 2006) and the learning of natural sciences through experience (Wickman 2004, 2006).

5. Many of the studies of argumentation related to socioscientific issues are based on the work of Stephen Toulmin and have used TAP as a methodological tool to study students’ conversations. See for example von Aufschnaiter et al. (2008), Erduran, Simon, and Osborne (2004), Jiménez-Aleixandre, Bugallo, and Duschl (2000) and Zeidler et al. (2003).