ABSTRACT
Following Aristotelian dialectic, the organised rational resolution of philosophical disputes had its place in European education during the mediæval period, within Christian religious training, alongside dictation, copying and rote learning of sacred texts. Disputes on the interpretation of texts were also organised within Jewish religious education in yeshiva schools but in this case in the form of dyadic discussions (Schwarz & Baker, 2017, Chapter 2). Following the Industrial Revolution, such practices were absent from secular state education organised for the masses, within classrooms managed under the authority of the teacher. Highly ritualised resolution of pre-defined disputes survived at university level, in the form of debating societies that prepared the protagonists for participation in public life. It took the societal erosion of authority, in the decades following the Second World War, for students’ authentic and sometimes conflicting voices to be heard again in school, within work in small groups. This has been studied by collaborative learning research (Dillenbourg, Baker, Blaye & O’Malley, 1996), with the aim of identifying the types of interpersonal interactions that are the most constructive (with respect to knowledge elaboration) and productive (of learning). Within this approach, there are three main reasons for focussing on the study of argumentative interactions.
