Arguing Across the Life Span: From Cindy Magic to Nature Scientific Reports

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

Abstract

Early in the 1990s, Elinor Ochs was intensely involved in situated discourse analysis at two sites: family dinner table talk between adults and children and the lab meetings of a physics research group at a Research 1 university. One of the papers that emerged at the intersection of this work (Ochs, Taylor, Rudolph, & Smith, 1992) analyzed family dinner table storytelling as theory-building activity and concluded that the argumentative practices in these everyday home interactions could be placed in a clear ontogenetic trajectory with those found in the physics lab. A later analysis (Ochs, Gonzalez, & Jacoby, 1994) identified the physicists' hybridized grammar, the way they spoke and gestured imaginatively as the phenomena they were studying. Investigating argument through discourse analysis and ethnography (see Newell, Bloome, & Hirvela, 2015; Prior, 2005) and drawing on the work of Ochs and her colleagues, I analyze in this paper trajectories of argumentation across the lifespan of Nora, my daughter, now a post-doctoral biologist researching the neuroendocrinology and behavioral display of sociality among zebra finches. Drawing on Hengst's research (2015) on a family pretend game (Cindy Magic) and my research over the past four years on Nora's becoming a biologist, this analysis will explore the roles of chronotopic lamination (Prior, 1998), fictionalization of self (Scollon & Scollon, 1981), identity (Ivanic, 1998), and discourse practices (Hanks, 1996) in Nora's trajectories of scientific argumentation across her lifespan. Finally, I will consider general implications of this analysis for theorizing, studying, and teaching argumentation.

Author

• Paul A. Prior, University of Illinois