Argumentation, one of the foundational pillars of writing instruction in K–12 schools, is consistently framed in literacy policy, curriculum, and assessment as a crucial skill youth need to participate in democratic deliberation. Yet the normative emphases in argument discourse on individual subjectivity, binary analysis, and competitive social scarcity stifle the development of the solidarity and relationality needed to counter rancorous political discord and to build equitable civic futures. In this conceptual essay, the authors offer a reimagined paradigm and practice of argument that fosters empathetic thinking and mutuality, moving away from the conceptualization of argument as solitary edifice and toward a vision of argument as collective architecture. Drawing upon lessons from global communicative traditions and recent turns in literacy scholarship toward participatory design, multimodality, and critical speculation, the authors provide five guiding principles for the Argument Writing as Architecture (AWA) framework, share vignettes from classroom and community learning spaces to illustrate its utility, and propose strategies for its implementation in K–12 classrooms.

Although a growing body of research recognizes the importance of viewing argumentation as a means of understanding rather than combating others, little is known about how teachers cultivate this practice in classroom conversations when teaching argumentation. This study examines how argument can be taught in classroom discourse with an empathizing stance and generates associated pedagogical constructs. Adopting a microethnographic approach to discourse analysis, this study examines the key instructional events in an argumentative writing unit in two high school English language arts classes. The analysis demonstrates that the empathizing stance is introduced in the relationship between arguers and their warrants and the differences existing between arguers. It also generates four pedagogical constructs related to the teaching of argument with the stance: (1) identifying the connection between arguers’ warrants and backgrounds; (2) transposing oneself into others’ backgrounds; (3) exploring interlocutors’ common and divergent grounds; and (4) situating argument in a broader context. It concludes with a discussion of the affordances of teaching argument with an empathizing stance.

There is a particular urgency in this political moment to understand children’s experiences with current events. Drawing from data generated following the 2016 presidential election, this paper focuses on three racially and linguistically diverse children’s persuasive compositions. Within a critical literacies writing unit focused on (im)migrant experiences, children called on legislators to act on the Republican administration’s policies. Building on the understanding that all literacies are political and that teaching and learning are value-laden tasks, the author engaged a cultural rhetorics orientation—grounded in the understanding of texts, bodies, materials, and ideas as interconnected aspects of communication—for data generation and analysis. The findings highlight how children strategically employed rhetoric to persuade. They used logos, pathos, and ethos, as well as story, a central tool for meaning-making and building practices in the world. Ultimately, this study demonstrates how children, when properly supported, can agentively participate in critical literacies and act on real-world politics. Through the stories of young children, this study emphasizes what children have to tell adults and what a cultural rhetorics orientation, through its emphasis on story, enables literacies researchers and educators to understand about children’s composing.

Since the publication of Wendy Bishop’s Released into Language (1990), the disciplinary boundaries of composition and creative writing have been in question. More recently, as Douglas Hesse’s “The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies” (2010) suggests, creative writing has been assumed to exist as a subdiscipline of composition despite efforts during the past decade to develop a new discipline, Creative Writing Studies. The research reported on and analyzed here argues for creative writing’s disciplinary status by using Toulmin’s (1972) definition of disciplinarity as a basis for claiming writers’ aesthetic documents as data and reporting those data in an aesthetic form. In our study, 57 students in first-year composition were asked to write a creative piece concerning how they came to the present place in their lives. Students produced 57 artifacts, including 55 poems, one script, and one visual narrative. These data were subsequently represented in fiction—that is, we used a novel to present our findings in an effort to assert the differences between the ways findings might be rendered in composition as opposed to creative writing. This paper examines what each subject area views as evidence and how that evidence might be most profitably analyzed and discussed in an aesthetic document. We suggest that the process of writing the novel is a method, a mode of analysis, with the novel itself as the articulation of the researchers’ analysis of the original data. Using this method, we studied creative writing aesthetically as creative writing and offer a justification for doing so.

For at least the last several decades, argumentative writing has been of central importance in secondary and higher education, and this emphasis has been heightened by argumentation’s designation as a “cornerstone” of the Common Core State Standards. Moreover, this focus on argumentation has been encouraged by extensive scholarship that investigates how argumentation is learned and deployed in various settings and how the teaching of argumentation might be improved. However, far less attention has been paid to determining why so many literacy educators,researchers, and policy makers believe that privileging argumentative writing is justified.Using a methodology that combines ethnographic case study of writing pedagogy in an urban high school with theoretical analysis of scholarly writings that endorse argumentation, in this essay I demonstrate that the prominence of argumentation is underwritten by three commonly held assumptions: (1) that argumentative writing promotes clear and critical thinking, (2) that it provides training in the rational deliberation that is essential for a democratic citizenry, and(3) that it imparts to students a form of cultural capital that facilitates their upward academic and socioeconomic mobility. My findings are that these assumptions are unwarranted and that schools’ overemphasis on argumentation imposes severe limits on what counts as valid thought,legitimate political subjectivity, and a feasible strategy for addressing economic inequality. This study’s implication is that educators should reassess the value of argumentation and revise ELA curricula to include more diverse genres and discursive modes.

Although current research and professional development on teaching of argumentative writing focus on “best practices,” we offer the construct of argumentative epistemologies to consider how English language arts teachers approach teaching and how they understand their students’ capacity for and interest in argumentation. Drawing on historical emphases in writing theory, we describe and illustrate three argumentative epistemologies: structural, ideational, and social practice. In an observational study of 31 high school English language arts classrooms, teachers’ enacted writing instruction foregrounded either formal elements of students’ arguments, the ideas and content of students’ arguments, or consideration of the complexity and variability of social contexts within which students wrote arguments. Case study analysis of three teachers illustrates the three argumentative epistemologies, how these epistemologies were socially constructed during instructional conversations, and how they were made visible through language use in and about classroom literacy events. These argumentative epistemologies have significance for teacher education, school writing research, and professional development, furthering our understanding of how and why teachers choose to adopt particular approaches to argumentative writing.

English education researchers have established that whole-class discussions can support language and literacy learning. However, few studies have provided examples of whole-class discussions in which students explicitly reference their classmates’ ideas in order to elaborate different, but related, perspectives. Research that has described students’ uptake of their classmates’ ideas has typically portrayed disagreement either as an obstacle to student participation or as a step toward eventual consensus. In this article, I offer a sociolinguistic discourse analysis of two conversations in which a preservice teacher encouraged her urban, 10th-grade students to disagree. My analysis demonstrates the positive effects of the teacher’s use of indirect challenges and provocative paraphrases—features of the African American sociable conflict-talk practice known as The Dozens—to promote collaborative disagreement during whole-class discussion. I argue that teachers can promote collaborative disagreement in whole-class discussions by appealing tostudents’ home-cultural disagreement practices, which may already overlap with argumentation practices valued in school settings. I call for further research into the influence of teachers’ and students’ out-of-school discourses on discussions characterized by collaborative disagreement—a practice that is essential to ELA curricula and to participation in a democratic, literate society.

Studies different methods of teaching argumentation to middle school students. Concludes that explicit instruction in argumentative form and argument structure sharpens students’ judgment regarding the content and organization needed to generate logically connected arguments and improves students’ writing of arguments. Finds that such an approach is particularly important for minority students.

This paper compares the effects of pencil-and-paper and computer-assisted versions of a process/model approach in a college writing program with the effects of a more traditional approach. Three empirical measures are used in the study: a frequency count of linguistic markers of argumentation and comparison/contrast based on previous work by Odell (1977), a measure of the number of arguments, and a measure of their logical integrity. All significant differences favored students in the experimental sections, who used more markers, made more arguments and made stronger arguments. Students in the computer-assisted (CAI) version of the experimental approach used still more markers than students in the pencil-and-paper version, suggesting that the CAI materials may enhance the efficiency of student learning of some formal aspects of reasoning in writing. These results suggest that it may be possible to attain a postprocess paradigm for teaching writing and thinking that transcends the dialectic that places process and product in opposition to each other.