had another meeting with john today.
showed him the EcoRangers® video, and explained how i was using it as an instructional tool to familiarise the pupils with the game (with much help from Royce and Peng Kee :-) )
he suggested i go have a look at the work of Stephen Toulmin. in his seminal 'The Uses of Argument', he devised a nomenclature to analyse the logical discourse used in 'real-world' situated debates (as opposed to the more classically-philosophical syllogistic structure of 'major premise', 'minor premise', and 'conclusion'.
for example, while an example of the latter would be 'all men are mortal', 'Socrates was a man', and 'Socrates was mortal', an example of Toulminian logical analysis would comprise 'claim', 'evidence' and 'warrant' (otherwise known as the implicit assumptions). thus, 'it rained last night', 'the car, street, and lawn, are all wet' and 'much water on the car, street, and lawn, could only be due to rain'.
to me, the strength of the Toulminian approach is that it encourages evaluation of the validity of the factors, in order to determine the extent to which the argument is persuasive. i also like the fact that the Toulminian model is flexible enough to be extended to incorporate other elements associated with authentic debate such as the 'concession', 'modality' (or 'qualification'), and 'rebuttal'.
i can certainly see much potential in introducing Toulminian logic to Social Studies teachers and their pupils.
but has it much relevance to my present research? looking again at my research questions, i fear not.
this is because i am not so much interested in the quality (as measured by the logical coherence) of the Structured Academic Controversies which the pupils engage in, but rather view the SAC activities more as vehicles into the minds of the learners, enabling us to have an insight into what exactly about their local environments they find geographically meaningful.
on a separate note, today marked the conclusion of the post-tests at Fuchun.
my time with them is nearly over.
the month has gone by in a flash. i still can clearly remember my apprehensive excitement as i waited in the school library, getting ready to brief them about the research study.
i have fond memories of my time in Fuchun. i'll join them one last time, for their peer critique, once they've concluded their mid-year examinations.
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