Argumentation and Constructive Interaction

Research on collaborative learning currently emphasises the need to understand the processes at work in communicative interactions between learners, as a means of discovering interactive learning mechanisms. Within this general research programme, we concentrate on the specific case of argumentative interactions, with the aim of describing how they can be constructive. A constructive interaction is defined as one in which new meanings or knowledge are coelaborated, and/or one that fulfils some specific (constructive) function with respect to cooperative activity. Our main proposal is that in order to address this research problem we need to combine analyses of argumentative interactions along five theoretically separable dimensions: dialectical, rhetorical, epistemological, conceptual and interactive. Respectively, these consider argumentative interactions in terms of rational criticism, cognitive effects on participants, the nature of knowledge involved, the form of cognitive representations and coelaboration of meaning and knowledge. We present a detailed analysis of an extended interaction sequence, taken from a corpus that was collected in a physics classroom. The analysis reveals how the interactive pressure imposed by the necessity to resolve interpersonal conflicts forces meanings and knowledge to evolve, and the basic function of argumentation in this context: filtering flawed proposals. NB Email address in 2009: [email protected]