Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Embracing A Productive Rhetorical Pragmatism: Teaching Writing As Democratic Deliberation, Jennifer Clifton

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

Our current points of stasis in American politics make clear: we are facing a deep crisis of imagination in public life. Our (in)ability to imagine the interests and experiences of others limits not only how we understand domestic and global citizenship but also how we enact that citizenship with others. In talk and in practice, the inability to take seriously the interests and experiences of others leads Americans – in English Language Arts classrooms and in public life – to cast those who disagree as deeply flawed in character – unpatriotic, ungodly, lazy, irresponsible, or criminal.

In this article, I …

The Effect Of Argumentative Task Goal On The Quality Of Argumentative Discourse, Merce Garcia-Mila, Sandra Gilabert, Sibel Erduran, Mark Felton

Faculty Publications

In argumentative discourse, there are two kinds of activity-dispute and deliberation-that depend on the argumentative task goal. In dispute the goal is to defend a conclusion by undermining alternatives, whereas in deliberation the goal is to arrive at a conclusion by contrasting alternatives. In this study, we examine the impact of these tasks goals on the quality of argumentative discourse. Sixty-five junior high school students were organized into dyads to discuss sources of energy. Dyads were formed by members who had differing viewpoints and were distributed to one of two conditions: 31 dyads were asked to discuss with the goal …