The argumentative script: a didactic proposal within the framework of Plantin’s interactive perspective

Abstract

As a part of basic formation, the study and practice of argumentation has become increasingly important in the middle school´s curriculum. For a society and culture that value democratic participation and debate of ideas, and that seek consensual, non-autoritarian ways of resolving their conflicts and differences, the education of children and teenagers in this practice is an unavoidable task of teaching in all levels.

Within the framework of Christian Plantin´s dialogical model (1998, 2012) we proposed a pedagogical alternative to the dominant tendency in school manuals used in middle school regarding the teaching of argumentation: instead of focusing reflection upon textual models and structures, focusing classroom´s practice in argumentative work from an interactive approach, starting with problematizing questions that give way to diverging responses and asking students the reconstruction of the argumentative situations that show those divergences (Muñoz y Musci, 2011, 2013).

In the present work we will go deeper into one of the notions involved in this proposal: the Argumentative Script. Defined by Plantin as “sets of arguments, counter-arguments and refutations related to a topic” (2021, p. 447), argumentative scripts preexist a given argumentation, are updateable and correspond to the state of an argumentative topic. From our point of view, knowledge about the script related to an argumentative problem is essential to intervene in an informed and clear fashion in any public controversy, and is worth introducing as an explicit content in teaching argumentative practice in the classroom.