The argumentum experience

Abstract

How can argumentation skills be improved by engaging students in argumentative practices where they are helped to assume a healthy critical attitude, and provide reasons for their positions? What are the synergies of learning to argue and arguing to learn (see chapter Argumentation and Learning, B. Schwarz)? This paper originates from these questions, and relies on the experience of teaching argumentation at university level, in the framework of the Swiss Virtual Campus project Argumentum (http://www.argumentum.ch). After presenting the aim and structure of Argumentum, this study focuses on a specific experience of argument production and analysis, occurred in the pedagogical scenario of argumentation classes at master level, at the University of Lugano. Students were asked to assume a specific position within a debate inspired by a famous historical controversy. Two different tools for constructing and analyzing arguments (see chapter Argumentation as an object of interest and as a social and cultural resource, E. Rigotti and S. Greco Morasso) were introduced within this didactical experience, allowing a progressively more comprehensive approach to argumentative interventions, including the production of an argumentative intervention, and the analysis and evaluation of arguments. The online course Argumentum provided the technical platform for this exercise of argumentation. Finally, the paper elaborates on the lessons learned by this experience. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.