Even though sustainable development concerns a common future for all, cultural diversity is often absent from teaching and educational policy documents on education for sustainable development in Norway. We present a dialogue sequence from a science class. The empirical material originates from a nine-month ethnographic classroom study in an upper secondary urban classroom in Norway. Our aim is to provide awareness of how plurality and diversity aspects of a sustainable future might widen pedagogical approaches to education. We used critical thematic analysis, theories of dialogic space and the concept of othering to examine the dialogue. In the dialogue sequence, the students used their own life experiences, representing different backgrounds, to give personal voice to three kinds of groups: we as citizens in the Norwegian welfare state, we with personal primary experiences from outside Norway and we as ‘foreigners’ in the gaze of others. During the conversation, the focus moved from others as needing assistance and as a burden towards common responsibility. Social and economic issues, comprising the local and the global, were addressed through personal narratives. The students started the conversation from a reformative approach on sustainable development, which seems to be in line with Norwegian school policy and practice on the topic. From that perspective they emphasised the need for knowledge and information as an important part of a sustainable future. During the conversation, the focus shifted, it's as if they began to doubt.
In this article, we discuss the negotiation of the situated common ground in classroom conversations. Decision making on socioscientific issues (SSI) includes norms of diverse funds of knowledge and interests. Arguments and justification may include warrants that cannot necessarily be weighed on the same scale. We discuss Roberts’ Visions 1 and 2 of scientific literacy as framing the common ground of classroom discussions. Two teacher–student dialogue sequences with 11th grade students from the Norwegian research project ElevForsk exemplify the negotiation of the situated common ground and the students’ deliberations. Our analysis examines what goes on in the thematic content, as well as at the interpersonal level of language use. Further, we suggest that different framings may complement each other and provide a space for the students’ emerging scientific conceptual development as well as for deliberation as a form of emerging procedural knowing.
In these student dialogues, deliberative aspects of argumentation in SSI inquiry are documented as different from strictly scientific argumentation. I suggest that deliberative argumentation is a complex alternation between reasoning patterns that relate to different activity layers. This understanding of deliberative argumentation emerged when analyzing students’ dialogues, developing the categories theme (theoria), inquiry (praxis) and inscribing (poeisis). Analyses are presented to account for this emerging understanding. The analyses utilize social functional linguistics (SFL), pragmatic conversation analysis, and rhetorical approaches to argumentation. What characterizes the students’ oral deliberation is an alternation between certain foci. Roberts’s (2011) use the terms theoria, praxis, and techne to characterize similar reasoning patterns in his Vision 1 and 2 of scientific literacy. I suggest that in civic deliberation all patterns of reasoning are necessary to handle SSI, whereas in strictly scientific argumentation, theoria is dominant. Such distinctions should also be considered when analyzing and developing instructional strategies.
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