(Re)constructing Social Relations and Rationality in the Teaching and Learning of Argumentative Writing in One Urban High School English Classroom

• In Event: Unpacking the Teaching and Learning of Argumentative Writing in an Urban High School English Classroom

Abstract

1. Purposes

The purpose of this paper is to generate grounded hypotheses about the construction of social relations and rationality in the teaching and learning of argumentative writing. As teachers and students engage in instructional conversations about argumentative writing they establish social relations among themselves (teacher-student, student-student), and between the students as authors and an audience for their writing. These social relationships are a context for the students’ discursive construction of what counts as an argument. In this paper, we examine how the construction of social relations during the teaching and learning of argumentative writing is implicated in what counts as knowledge, as an audience, and as rationality (what is and is not logical).

2. Perspectives

The perspective taken is grounded microethnographic discourse analysis (cf., Bloome et al, 2005) building on the ethnography of communication, critical discourse analysis, and the New Literacy studies. At the core of this perspective is a basic premise that people act and react to each other, primarily through language, and that they may do so over time. The perspective taken on rationality builds on discussions by Eagleton’s (2000), Bourdieu & Wacquant (1992) and Chouliaraki & Fairclough, (1999). These discussions frame rationality as socially constructed and situated.

3. Methods

As indicated in the general summary of the session, this paper focuses on analysis of one instructional unit in one 11th grade classroom that was part of a broader study. Following procedures for microethnographic discourse analysis, the video data from the instructional unit was analyzed focusing on the construction of social relations and definitions of argument, knowledge, and rationality. After transcribing key video segments across the days of the instructional unit, the interactional construction of social relations is described on a moment by moment basis as it evolves over the lesson. Then, within and across events, the construction of knowledge, argument, and rationality are described within the context of the social relations already identified and triangulated with other data sources.

4. Data sources

Data sources included daily video recordings of each lesson, interviews with students, student written products, and video-prompted interviews with teachers.

5. Results

The results show a tension between the assumption of a formal (decontextualized) rationality held by the teacher and students for the production of an argument and the construction of social relations among the students and with definitions of knowledge which in this classroom were operationalized as dialogic (knowledge was generated through the promotion of dialogues among students). However, this tension was often pushed aside during instructional conversations; yet, it dominated the written compositions.

6. Scholarly significance

The findings suggest that the teaching and learning of argumentative writing is not just a linear process of helping students acquire an argumentative schema or the components and structures of an argument. But rather, it is a complex process in which students and teachers must negotiate a series of tensions between situated social relations, definitions of knowledge, and rationality, and assumptions that argumentation is a decontextualized process.

Authors

• David M. Bloome, The Ohio State University

• Allison Wynhoff-Olsen, Ohio State University