Reasoning Together. The Case of Argumentative Discussions in Family and School

This chapter focuses on the family and school context to examine how parents and children and teachers and students contribute interactionally to managing their argumentative discussions. Within a data corpus comprising 30 video-recorded meals of 10 Swiss and Italian families (sub-corpus A) and 16 video-recorded lessons of two courses – one at the undergraduate level and one at the graduate level – in Developmental Psychology (sub-corpus B), argumentative discussions were selected for qualitative analysis by adopting the pragma-dialectical model of a critical discussion and the Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT). Despite the differences in roles, age, and competencies between parents and children and between teachers and students, the findings of this study indicate that in the family and the school context, managing their argumentative discussions is a co-constructed dialogical process. In particular, by engaging in argumentative discussions, parents and teachers accept the commitment to clarifying to children and students the reasons on which their standpoints are based. Children and students, in turn, encourage parents and teachers to advance arguments to justify their standpoints by asking questions. In conclusion, this study shows how argumentative discussions in the family and school context open a shared space for parents and children and teachers and students to reason together. Future research might consider the observations and the subtle qualitative analyses of argumentative discussions in the family and school context as possible ways to recognize the co-construction of reasoning processes in educational contexts.