Since July 2013, our research team has been working on a project that aims at re-introducing rhetorical exercises in Belgian secondary (high) schools and at studying their effects on the pupils. Our hypothesis is that the regular practice of rhetorical exercises, inspired by those practised in Antiquity, could stimulate skills like…

Setting out to teach Magna Carta to the full attainment range in Year 7, Mark King decided to choose a question that reflected real scholarly debates and also to ensure that pupils held enough knowledge in long-term memory to be able to think about that question meaningfully. As he gradually prepared his pupils to produce their own causation…

Too often, the authors assert, discussion of controversial issues in high school classrooms is channeled through the teacher, rather than engaging students in discussion with one another. Teachers fear that students won't know how to talk to one another productively about issues, or that they'll end up in shouting matches. But when…

On 9 April 1930, a philanthropist called Edward Harkness donated millions of dollars to the Phillips Exeter Academy in the USA. He hoped that his donation could be used to find a new way for students to sit around a table with their teacher and "feel encouraged to speak up". This led to the development of what is now known as the…

Reason Racer is an online, rate-based, multiplayer game that applies specific game features in order to engage middle school students in introductory knowledge of and thinking related to scientific argumentation. Game features include rapid and competitive play, timed performance, immediate feedback, and high rates of response across many…

A qualitative exploratory study was conducted to reveal students' argumentation skills in the context of the topic of evolution. Transcripts from problem-centred interviews on secondary students' beliefs about evolutionary processes of adaptation were analysed using a content analysis approach. For this purpose two categorical systems were…

Writing, reading, and dramatic performance have long been powerful means for representing and contending with thorny problems, and the authors see much promise in engaging students in authoring the dramas and solutions that represent their fears and their hopes for resolutions. In this article, the authors share a series of writing activities and…

In the present STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)-driven society, socioscientific issues (SSI) have become a focus globally and SSI research has grown into an important area of study in science education. Since students attending the social and science programs have a different focus in their studies and research has shown…

This paper presents a normative pragmatics analysis of students' use of science content in eight socioscientific group discussions about human gene therapy. The specific focus of the paper is on the argumentative role that invocations of science had in the dialectics of the discussions. The analysis suggests that science content occasionally…

Over the past twenty years much work has been done by teachers of secondary English to describe and make explicit the semiotic resources used to access and critique the discourses of powerful institutions such as schooling. At the same time, however, there has been a growing recognition that the rhetorical resources needed for adolescents to…

This study investigates the outcomes of two novice preservice teachers' (PSTs') attempts at taking up the roles of critical guides (Damico & Apol, 2008) to mediate discussions about racism in response to President Barack Obama's (2008) campaign speech "A More Perfect Union." With the objective of teaching for social justice, these…

Human history is often shaped by the outcomes of arguments, not only in the sense of disputes between people or governments, but in the sense of the more rational pursuit of trying to convince others to accept or do certain things by offering reasons that are presented as compelling for so doing. Yet history teachers have done little to help…

The influence of the Other on utterance is foundational to language study. This analysis contrasts this influence within two modes of communication: reflective writing and interview. The data source is derived from the reflective writings and interview transcripts of a twelfth-grade physics student. In this student's case, reflective writing…