Embracing Rationalities: Writing Arguments in a 12th-Grade Advanced Placement Language Arts Class

• In Event: Reflection and Refraction in the Teaching and Learning of Academic Literacy Practices Across Grades

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to explore how writing arguments was taught to advanced placement 12th grade students with a focus on how the students took up the writing practices taught. Of special interest was how the teacher and students interactionally constructed a definition of argument, rationality, and “good” writing.

Methods, techniques, modes of inquiry, data sources, evidence, objects or materials
An ethnographic framework combined with microethnographic discourse analysis was used (cf., Bloome et al., 2005). This focused attention on how teachers and students act and react to each other and how they constructed educational events and the relationships among educational events. Participant observation occurred everyday for six weeks. Each lesson was video recorded and student written work collected. Students and the teacher were interviewed. Data analysis focused on (a) how definitions of argumentation were interactionally constructed over time, (b) how principles of rationality were implied an made apparent, (c) how definitions of “good” writing were defined, and how each of the items above were (d) reflected in student writing and evolved over time. Data analysis also focused on how didactic events were connected to opportunities for the students individually and in small peer groups to explore their own efforts at constructing and writing arguments. Analytic procedures involved identification of key video recorded events for analysis, triangulation with interviews and student written work, and exploration of the corpus of data for recurrence of patterns of language use and social construction of literacy practices in analogous events and for the evolution of the patterns over time.

Results
Results showed that didactic presentation of the elements of argumentation occurred when the teacher and students read published arguments and critiqued those arguments. Elements of argumentation were discussed along side how to employ deeper and more complex argumentation that incorporate dialectic relationships between sides of an argument. In these discussions, the teacher scaffolded student analysis to go beyond structural elements and to address substantive issues (either from content areas or from life experiences). The result was an interplay of structural definitions and non-structural (substantive) definitions of argumentation that, over time, evolved to an emphasis on problematizing and making complex arguments with a recognition of the potential for bridging opposite sides of an argument. Although there was often focus on and use of language associated with doing well on the AP test, such language existed side by side with the language of meaningful argumentation that explored issues deeply and complexly (similar to communicative rationality, cf., Habermas, 1984). These results suggested that both didactic instruction (reflecting academic literacy practices associated with argumentation) and opportunities to play with the meaning and structure of an argument (refractions of academic argumentative writing practices) were important for engaging students in argumentation beyond structural elements and for using argumentative writing as a means to create new knowledge and insights.

Authors

• SangHee Ryu, The Ohio State University - Columbus

• Allison S. Wynhoff Olsen, Montana State University

• David M. Bloome, The Ohio State University