In the international policy debate, environmental education and education for sustainable development seem to be moving away from a focus on behavioural modifications to more pluralistic approaches. This article illuminates a Swedish example of a strategic interplay between evaluation, development and research that relates to this shift, involving actors from schools, governmental agencies and researchers. The specific purpose of the research was to analyse and describe teachers' attempts to stimulate a pluralistic meaning-making process among their students in the context of education for sustainable development. The empirical material consisted of video-recorded lessons in secondary and upper secondary schools. In the analysis we used a methodological approach based on John Dewey's pragmatic philosophy and Ludwig Wittgenstein's firstperson perspective on language. A concept called 'epistemological moves' has been used to clarify the actions that teachers perform in order to guide students in procedures of meaning-making. The analysis shows that the teachers perform a number of actions that make pluralistic meaning-making possible: encouraging the students to compare, specify, generalise and test their arguments under different circumstances. The teachers also encouraged the students to examine and evaluate different alternatives and be critical of their own statements. Finally, the findings are related to a perspective of democracy as a form of life.
In this study, the purpose is to develop and illustrate a method that facilitates investigations of students' learning processes in classroom discussions about socioscientific issues. The method, called transactional argumentation analysis, combines a transactional perspective on meaning making based on John Dewey's pragmatic philosophy and an argument analysis based on Toulmin's argument pattern. This analytical method consists of three steps. In the first step, we analyze the direction of the students' meaning making, that is, the relations construed in and by action. In the second step, we use a functional interpretation of Toulmin's argument pattern to clarify the meanings in terms of argumentative elements. Finally, we investigate the students' learning progress, both in terms of the way the arguments are constructed and the knowledge content used, by comparing each student's arguments over time. The empirical material consists of a video-recorded lesson in a Swedish upper secondary school. Two examples of learning processes identified during the classroom discussion are described: learning to specify the conditions for one's claim and learning to find new solutions. These examples show that the suggested method can be used to identify the different kinds of learning progressions that take place during students' argumentative discussions.
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