Nathalie Muller Mirza – författare

During the last decade, argumentation has attracted growing attention as a means to elicit processes (linguistic, logical, dialogical, psychological, etc.) that can sustain or provoke reasoning and learning. Constituting an important dimension of daily life and of professional activities, argumentation plays a special role in democracies and is at the heart of philosophical reasoning and scientific inquiry. Argumentation, as such, requires specific intellectual and social skills. Hence, argumentation will have an increasing importance in education, both because it is a critical competence that has to be learned, and because argumentation can be used to foster learning in philosophy, history, sciences and in many other domains.

Argumentation and Education answers these and other questions by providing both theoretical backgrounds, in psychology, education and theory of argumentation, and concrete examples of experiments and results in school contexts in a range of domains. It reports on existing innovative practices in education settings at various levels.

The book pursues the goal of exploring and strengthening a dialogical approach of communication and cognition. It brings together contributions from world-leading researchers related to the dialogical approach in education and psychology. It presents, among others, the place of language and materiality in the development of communication and thinking, as well as the role of the methods in the relationship between researchers and participants. This leads to an innovative definition of the dialogicality and how a dialogical approach can provide heuristic (conceptual and methodological) tools to better understand how people think, communicate and learn in a complex world.

The authors hereby develop an epistemological framework inspired by scholars such as Michaïl Bakhtin, Lev Vygotsky and Herbert Mead under the assumption that dialogue, or dialogicality - and therefore the presence of the other – is fundamentally entangled into the human thinking and development.

This book contributes to the understanding of human communication, cognition and mind, and participates in a scientific dialogue which helps to advance future research. It includes theoretical and empirical chapters and presents innovative methods of inquiry, which makes it a useful tool for both teaching and research.