ABSTRACT
Rhetorical studies of science view knowledge as actively constructed by scientists working individually or collectively on problems and being held accountable to public standards through the reasoning displayed in texts open to criticism and evaluation. This perspective highlights scientists’
need to refine reasoning, limit theoretical claims, marshal evidence, and understand strengths and limits of their evidence and arguments so as to make credible and creditable knowledge claims within their knowledgeable and critical communities of peers (Latour, 1987; Myers, 1990). To learn the argumentative practices of their fields, students must gain a feel for the communicative forms, forums, and dynamics of their fields. They must learn the kinds of claims people make and how they advance them; what literatures people rely on and how these literatures are invoked; what kind of evidence is needed to warrant arguments and how that evidence can be appropriately developed, analyzed, and interpreted given community standards; what kinds of concepts are appropriately evoked; and what kind of stance authors can appropriately take as contributors to their fields. As students develop their discipline-specific communicative skills, they enter into community practice of empirical investigation and application of communally developed knowledge. In this communal engagement with the material world (Goodwin, 1995) the role of evidence is centrally important. Currently, scientific fields generally endorse and enforce high levels of accountability between detailed findings and general idea claims through review and argumentation processes (Bazerman, 1988; Myers, 1990). Rhetorical analyses of writing in scientific professions have examined the historically emergent forms of argument deployed in professional practicethe genres and the activity systems they are part of (Bazerman, 1988, 1994, 1997; Prior, 1998; Freedman & Medway, 1994; Swales, 1990; van Nostrand, 1997). Related analyses have looked at the rhetorical specifics and strategies of individual cases of argument (Bazerman, 1993; Pera & Shea, 1991). This chapter brings this research to bear on how student writers make local linguistic, argumentative choices within a genre’s organization and the expectations invoked within the activity system-here encapsulated in a school assignment that foregrounds the use of evidence in relation to claims. While argumentation in spoken discourse has been examined extensively in science education (e.g., Erduran & Jimenez-Aleixandre, 2008; Sampson & Clark, 2008), writing provides a potentially useful strategy to engage students in the social and cognitive practices of evidence formation. Writing tasks can be constructed to socialize students to disciplinary knowledge, norms, and practices, providing realistic learning tasks, as in the case examined here. Written argument can also be used to assess students’ engagement with scientific knowledge, norms, and practices.
