Mobilization of Emotions as Argumentative Resources in Argumentation About Vegetarianism

• In Event: Advancing Students' Argumentation: Moving Beyond Structure

Abstract

Objectives and theoretical framework: Argumentative discourse has a complexity that is not entirely captured by purely structural analyses. In arguments about socio-scientific issues a range of dimensions are mobilized besides scientific knowledge, such as values, ethical concerns, cultural habits or emotions. The relationship between argumentation and emotions remains an understudied issue. Previous work addressed this relationship in terms of distinctions among types of arguments, as Zeidler & Sadler's (2008) description of three argumentative patterns: rational, intuitive and emotive. We present a different approach, for we are interested in the dynamic interactions among emotions, appeals to scientific evidence, and other dimensions such as cultural identities or ethical concerns. Plantin (2011) proposes that emotions are mobilized as argumentative resources, alongside knowledge and norms. The goal of our study is to examine in which ways emotive resources contribute to the construction of arguments about vegetarian versus omnivorous diets by pre-service teachers.

Data sources and methods: 75 pre-service primary teachers participated in the study. They were involved in tasks about evidence evaluation, criteria for strong arguments and balanced diets; they sought information about dimensions (ecological, ethical, nutritional, economical or cultural) of diets, shared through a wiki, and constructed arguments about diets in small groups (N=20). Data collection included students’ written products (individual pre-test, portfolios, final essays; group arguments) and video recording. The analysis focuses on the oral debates and written arguments. Discourse was coded using grounded theory approaches, drawing from Plantin’s (2011).

Selected results: the analysis shows that: a) emotive resources were mobilized in the written arguments, showing that they are not specific of oral contexts, although the emotive discourse was toned down; b) the four more frequent themes carrying emotive weight were animal suffering, (e.g., “daily slaughtering of animals”), health risks (“particularly dangerous diets”), world hunger (“people dying of hunger”), and cultural values (“our own cultural heritage”); c) From Polo’s (2014) four types of manifestations of emotions, the supported (implicit) were the more frequent, as in the examples above, followed by shown emotions in the oral debates; d) proximity, evidenced by the use of first person, was used as a resource in all groups; e) emotive tonality influenced the dynamics of argument construction in the small groups. These results suggest that the construction of an argument and the construction of an emotive position are deeply connected, a finding coherent with Polo et al.’s (2013) results.

Significance: The study shows that arguments’ quality, according to structural criteria, is compatible with the integration of emotive resources. A fine-grained analysis of the contribution of emotive resources may help reveal related dimensions, such as the relationship between the mobilization of emotions and the perception by participants’ of their own agency. Educational implications are, for instance, the interest of designing argumentation tasks that specifically take into account this emotive dimension, which may lead to a deeper student engagement and personal agency, which is relevant for socio-scientific issues and in particular for the question of sustainable diets, as it depends largely on personal decisions rather than on institutional responsibility.

Authors

• Pablo Brocos, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela

• Maria Pilar Jimenez-Aleixandre, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela