Interpersonal Argumentation in Educational and Professional Contexts

236 Pages·2017·7.7 MB·English

by  Francesco Arcidiacono

Francesco Arcidiacono
Antonio Bova Editors
Interpersonal
Argumentation
in Educational
and Professional
Contexts
Interpersonal Argumentation in Educational
and Professional Contexts
Francesco Arcidiacono Antonio Bova
(cid:129)
Editors
Interpersonal Argumentation
in Educational
and Professional Contexts
123
Editors
Francesco Arcidiacono AntonioBova
HEP-BEJUNE Universitàdella Svizzera italiana
University of Teacher Education Lugano
Biel/Bienne Switzerland
Switzerland
ISBN978-3-319-59083-7 ISBN978-3-319-59084-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59084-4
LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2017941464
©SpringerInternationalPublishingAG2017
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Foreword
When I was asked by one of my best former students, Francesco Arcidiacono,
currentlyprofessorattheUniversityofTeacherEducationBEJUNEinBiel/Bienne,
and by his collaborator, Dr. Antonio Bova, to write a foreword for their relevant
bookon“InterpersonalArgumentationinEducationalandProfessionalContexts,”I
was looking at the impressive collection of scientific contributions, within a large
set of national realities, that are included in the present volume. These papers
strongly contribute to the further development of research on argumentative
dimensions connected to educational and professional contexts, because of their
natureofdistinctiveandnewcontributionsinthefieldofargumentation.Thistopic
andthecurrentstateofthefieldarewellrepresentedinthisvolumeandofferedme
the possibility to look back at my past experiences in studying argumentation in
Italian schools over the last 40 years. In fact, in the 1980s, through studying
classroomdiscussionsoncurriculainbiology,physicsandsocialhistory,chosenby
ourselves in fifth grade classrooms, we observed, through the careful and repeated
reading of the transcripts of didactic interactions, how children of primary school
were solicited to develop their reasoning and explanation in order to answer to the
pertinentobjectionsofaclassmate(thatwehaveindicatedas“sceptic”byvirtueof
adissatisfactionbytheexplanationsadvancedbyothers).Whenteacherswereopen
to giving children the freedom to express their ideas (as was the case of two
excellent teachers, Delia Castiglia and Ornella Formentini, participating in our
research at the Montessori school “S.M. Goretti” in Rome), the great educational
relevance of verbal interactions among children of different social status was
immediately visible.
My idea at that time (Pontecorvo 1987) was firstly based, at a theoretical level,
on the pivotal works of Toulmin (1958) and of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca
(1971) that had the merit to value the classical rhetoric tradition. However, I was
learning something very interesting by listening to a sentence produced by a child
of 2.5 years, Marianna, the daughter of two friends who were guests in my
countryside home. The child was eating vanilla and chocolate ice cream offered to
herand,whenthemother(anexcellentscientistofchilddevelopmentandexpertin
health)enteredtheroom,said:“Butthevanillaishealthy!”avoidinganyreference
v
vi Foreword
to chocolate and showing the need to account for her action by a valid argument,
preventing possible comments against the mother’s objection to commercial ice
cream.
During that period of research, as one of the main interest was the scientific
thoughtofchildren(especiallywithintheresearchgroupUniversità-Scuola,G.U.S.
in 1979), I was regularly invited to the “Journées internationales sur l’éducation
scientifique”promotedbyAndréGiordaninChamonixduringtheperiodofJanuary
andFebruaryof1983and1984.Duringthesemeetings,Iwasdiscoveringtheworks
of Ducrot (1980) and Caron (1983) that were showing to what extent, even in the
course of ordinary conversation (written and oral), there are different degrees and
scales of argumentation, referred to various knowledge values. In addition, by
developingtheworkonthescientificcurriculum,webecomemoreandmoreaware
oftheconnectionbetweenopposing,arguingandexplaining(cf.Pontecorvo1983,
1990). Always in Chamonix (Giordan and Martinand 1984) I was in charge, with
JeanMathieu,ofaseminarofdiscussionabouttheargumentativestrategies(withthe
participation,amongothers,ofcolleaguessuchasCaravita,Caron,Coty,Gagliardi,
Lammé, Vermès and Wermus). During the very intense verbal interactions of the
group we weredebatingdifferent interestingtopics, suchasthe needtogo beyond
the opposition between natural and scientific thoughts, scientific explanation and
argumentativethinking.Weweremainlyorientedtowardsaneducationalapproach
valuingclassroomdiscussionasapowerfultooltopromoteeffectiveargumentation
andtoconstructthescientificthoughtanddiscourseofchildren.Lateron,duringthe
biennial EARLI congresses, I was confronted with the studies on argumentation
done by Baruch Schwarz and colleagues (Schwarz and Glassner 2003). In his
original research (Schwarz 2011), he was studying the discussions on Talmud
amongstudentsofYeshivà(Israeliinstitutestotraintherabbis).Thesecontributions
wereopeningnewavenuesinthefieldofargumentationthatisstillofactualinterest,
as it isthecase in thepresentvolume.
In the further works of my research group, we discovered the relevance of the
child’s position as a sign of “assuming a point of view” within a small group (see
thevolumepresentedin1991“Discutendosiimpara”editedbyPontecorvo,Ajello
and Zucchermaglio; and Orsolini and Pontecorvo 1992), and not only during
classroom discussion, when the teacher is able to uptake a valuable child’s inter-
vention which is not considered by other interlocutors. The cited book has been
frequentlyusedintheItalianschoolsystemandhasbeentranslatedintoPortuguese
andpublishedinBrazil(Pontecorvoetal.2005).Inaddition,wewereexperiencing
other designs involving small groups of kindergarten and primary school children
(Pontecorvo 1993). These studies have indicated interesting key points in the field
ofeducational argumentationandhaveinspirednewdirections,asitisthecasefor
some of theworks presentedinthis volume.Thesecontributions havethe merit of
expanding and improving our knowledge about the interpersonal dimensions
connected to argumentation.
A few years beforehand, we were discovering the relevant work of Michael
Billig(1987).Iwasimpressedbytheextendeduseofancientsources,includingthe
Foreword vii
studies of Greek rhetoric, as well as the use of the famous story of Rav Eliezer
(presentedintheBabylonianTalmud,theTractatusBabaMetzia):indiscussingthe
ritual cleaning of an oven with students, Rav Eliezer defends a thesis that is not
accepted by others; after having recalled two miraculous events which really
happened (the moving of a carob tree and the removing of an external wall of the
house) to sustain the thesis, he appeals to God’s intervention and got it.
Consequently, thegroup ofRabbis opposes Godandcitesfrom theBible that“the
law is not in the sky (…) and a legal decision does not depend on the age of the
teacherbutonthepowerofhis/herargumentation.”Asitwasexpected,thevolume
of Billig produced a revolutionary effect within the field of contemporary social
psychology,evenasproductoftheresearchgroup“DiscourseandRhetoric”atthe
University of Loughborough, also involving Jonathan Potter and Margaret
Wetherell, as well as Derek Edwards and David Middleton, from whom I read
variousresearchconcerningdifferentsocialcontextsandwhomImetseveraltimes
during EARLI congresses. Concerning Billig’s conception, he affirms that all
essential cognitive activities are produced by a discourse of several participants,
even within memory. Thus, what is considered in the psychology field as an
individualmentalactivityisacollectiveproduct(asitemergesfromabookwritten
in 1990 by Edwards and Middleton on remembering). Thanks to Billig we have
discovered the role of Bakhtin, who, translated into English few times before,
underlined, by citing Plato, the function of dialogue, in which truth “shoots like a
spark” in the relationship between two speakers (p. 29). The interactionist and
discursive conception of thought was connected to our constant re-reading of
“Thought and Language” written by Vygotskij (1990), and also to a new attention
for the work of Hannah Arendt for whom “the individual thought is a form of
internal dialogue” (p. 42). Different contributions in this volume are excellent
examplesofhowtheseconceptionsarestillrelevantineducationalandprofessional
contexts in which interpersonal argumentation plays a central role. Research on
childrenoffourthgradeinaschoolofRome,startingfromawrittendocumentofa
Roman historian, led us to discover the presence of a counterfactual reasoning in
autonomous discussions of small groups: through analysing this reasoning, I had
the privilege to be accompanied by Merrilee Salmon, excellent professor of
informal logics at the University of Pittsburgh, and really interested by the col-
lectiveargumentationofourItalianfourthgradechildren(GirardetandPontecorvo
1993). Having those conceptual and methodological tools at our disposal, in 1991
(duringtheISCRATCongressinLahti,Finland,duringaseminaronliteracyledby
Elinor Ochs) we discovered the Conversation Analysis (CA) as a powerful tool to
read and interpret human interaction in different contexts (Ochs 1986).
Consequently, we started a national research project (in an analogous way to the
research that Elinor Ochs was conducting at the same time in Los Angeles) on
dinnertime conversations of Italian middle-class families. This topic is still con-
stitutingarelevantfieldofresearchwithineducationalargumentation,asshowedin
oneofthecontributionsinthisvolume.Inmyexperience,theCAapproachhadthe
merit to solicit a collaborative process of work and analysis: in fact, theresearcher
Alessandra Fasulo and (at that time) the advanced Ph.D. student Laura Sterponi,
viii Foreword
bothexpertsofCA,weremembersoftheresearchgroupandfullyimmersedinthe
context of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The group included
four new Ph.D. students (Francesco Arcidiacono, Marilena Fatigante, Vivian
Liberati and Barbara Maroni), as well as a variable number of master students in
developmental and educational psychology, under my supervision. During that
period,wereceivedavisitfromDr.TaniaZittoun(currentlyprofessorofeducation
at the University of Neuchâtel). Tania Zittoun was immediately interested in the
cooperative atmosphere of the group, in which the master students were in primis
referring to one of the Ph.D. students and only later discussing their works within
the whole research group. This modality of reciprocal and collaborative teaching
and learning could have been an input for the promotion of a further international
seminar organized by Tania Zittoun with her colleagues Baucal, Cornish and
Gillespie, and sponsored by the European Science Foundation, on the issue of
“collaboration in psychological research,” in Veysonnaz (Switzerland) in June
2006, which included five collaborative case studies. At the meeting were inter-
national well-known researchers, among which Engeström, proposing his
applicative research in different social contexts (based on the Activity Theory of
Leont’ev), Plichova and Marková, studying prospective ideological variables in
Eastern European countries at the end of the Soviet period. However, the research
that was probably among the most interesting for me was the study “DUNES”
coordinated by Baruch Schwarz in collaboration with a Swiss group headed by
Michèle Grossen about the argumentative education and the relevant informatics
implications. The connection between educational aspects and technological
innovations in the field of argumentation is well highlighted by some of the con-
tributions of the present volume.
Iapologize tomyfriends andeditorsofthebookif their request for a foreword
has activated such an autobiographical personal discovery of the relevance of
argumentation,inconnectiontothevolume’scontributionsofmanyotherexcellent
colleagues. The international dimension of the various papers is a relevant aspect
and a merit of the present book: the study of interpersonal argumentation in dif-
ferentcontextsandrealitiesstronglycontributestounderstandingthecomplexityof
socio-cultural dimensions connected to argumentative processes. More recently, I
have been thinking about the fact that, starting from the doctoral study on Italian
familiesconductedbyLauraSterponi,wehaveunderstoodtherelevanceofparental
requests towards children, of the need to account for a violation (action) or for
incorrect verbal expressions. These requests are almost absent within the
middle-classfamilyinteractionsstudied byOchsinLosAngeles(Ochs andTaylor
1992),inwhichchildrenobeyveryquicklytoparentaldirectives.Itisuniquethata
requestofaccountinfamilyplaystheroleofpromotingthechildrenargumentation
(Pontecorvo and Arcidiacono 2016), as well as that the opposition solicited in
classroom discussions promotes argumentation and counter-argumentation in
kindergarten and primary children. It is possible that the role of verbal opposition,
at least in Italian families, is played by an attempt of not complying to disobey
parental requests. However, by recognizing in this important volume the multiple
settings that concern the use of argumentative strategies that are analogous yet
Foreword ix
varied,Imustobservetowhatextentargumentationcanbeusedalsobeyondschool
and family contexts. It is possible that the educational context keeps a type of
ontogenetic priority, while the application to contexts of professional training or
different organizations opens new relevant perspectives.
I believe that this volume will contribute to the further development of inter-
personal argumentation based on a common socio-cultural ground and varied
applications to different social contexts.
Clotilde Pontecorvo
“Sapienza” University of Rome, Italy
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