Engaging Young Students in Scientific Argumentation as Transformation

• In Event: 67.066 - Teaching and Learning of Argumentation and Argumentative Reading and Writing in the Academic Disciplines

Abstract

In his analysis of the development of the experimental article as a genre, Charles Bazerman (1988, p. 315) cautions that, “by identifying certain regularities… as characteristic of scientific language, linguists have given the impression that these regularities are timeless expressions of the essential character of science.” Instead, he writes, “we must account for the functional emergence of such regularities to understand what they are and what they do.” As researchers and educators seeking to apprentice students into disciplinary practices such as argumentation, it is easy to focus on timeless expressions by distilling experts’ activity into structures that can be explained, modeled, and practiced. In this talk, I describe how I have taken up Bazerman’s notion of “functional emergence” to design for and analyze elementary students’ scientific argumentation. I begin with what scientific argumentation does: it serves to construct, critique, and shore up a transformational chain allowing scientists to link concrete, material particulars to general, abstract claims (Latour, 1987; Pickering, 1995). I then describe a framework for design and analysis that focuses on the transformations involved in constructing a scientific argument (Kelly & Takao, 2002; Manz, 2016). Namely, the framework orients us toward what epistemic work along a chain of transformation is being undertaken, for whom that work is meaningful, and for what purpose the work is seen as meaningful. Further, I explore how analyzing elementary school science conversations using this framework (1) suggests an alternative model to typical assumptions that students should first make scientific claims in situations characterized by simple evidence, then later problematize what counts as evidence and (2) orients us toward the design of argumentation-worthy learning environments. I end by exploring how approaches oriented toward “timeless expressions” and “functional emergence” might be profitably integrated in classroom instruction.

Author

• Eve Manz, Boston University