ABSTRACT
In Curriculum as Conversation, Arthur Noble Applebee argues for a vision of curriculum as "knowledge-in-action", arising out of "participation in ongoing conversations about things that matter". This chapter explains how a close examination of students' writing evidenced their efforts to enact roles within the classroom that are consistent with the kinds of participation Applebee's vision evoke. Toulmin's model of argument, with its basis in everyday conversation and its applicability across contexts, offered a useful way to think about the elements involved in generating argumentative positions. Assessors took this model as the basis of the curriculum and set out to design classroom activities that offered students regular opportunities to form claims from data and articulate warrants to justify their reasoning. Mikhail M. Bakhtin demonstrates how, on one level, utterances are answerable to the immediate context in which they occur. Students' utterances enact a perfunctory relationship when they respond monologically to the setting—they neither aim for nor anticipate subsequent utterances.
