EDUA 5464 Teaching Oral & Written Argument
WHY ARGUE: TEACHING THE ART OF ORAL AND WRITTEN ARGUMENT
How many times have you heard a student say "because" or use subjective reasoning when asked to support an argument? These are just a few of the common struggles students have when developing and communicating arguments. Developing arguments requires the student to engage multiple critical thinking skills as she generates extended definitions of concepts, articulates warrants, establishes criteria, and, ultimately, defends a conclusion or judgment. Argument also involves scrutiny of ones values and beliefs as well as the capacity to engage in productive dialogue with others whose values and beliefs differ from our own. The many important skills of argument apply across the disciplines and can be addressed at any stage in a middle- or high-school student’s educational career, as he or she exercises increasingly demanding cognitive tasks.
From this course the teacher will learn best practices for engaging students in rich processes and procedures for argument development, from class-wide inquiries, to small-group data analysis, to the individual’s writing tasks. By the end of the course, the teacher will be able to support students as they learn to argue relevant concerns with increasing complexity and express their arguments elegantly and logically, making "because" a thing of the past.