Providing a rationale for promoting argument-based inquiry approach to science education: a deweyan pragmatist aesthetics perspective

Argumentation in science education is a well-established and successful research programme. Key theoretical underpinnings of this approach come from situated cognition perspective, the theory of communicative action and the sociocultural perspective, language studies and social semiotics, philosophy of science studies, and developmental psychology. In this paper, it will be argued that all these theoretical frameworks that aim to provide a rationale for promoting argument-based inquiry approach to science education stand to benefit if their unique insights can be brought together within the theory of Deweyan pragmatist aesthetics. It is my contention that learners first need to experience the most fundamental human situation, namely, the problematic as the ontological condition of experiencing the world as a human, in carefully calibrated pedagogically appropriate settings to get the process of collaborative inquiry going. One such setting is provided by the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH), an argument-based collaborative inquiry approach to experience negotiation of meaning in relation to science content in school. It will be claimed that the SWH approach, which is an immersion-oriented argument intervention model, is successful to the extent that it enacts a learning situation whereby the process of collaborative inquiry as understood by Dewey unfolds and provides a consummatory experience for the learners as well as the teachers.

Argument-Based Inquiry ,

John Dewey ,

Pragmatist Aesthetics ,

Science Writing Heuristic ,