Toward the Ethnography of Argumentation: A Response to Richard Andrews' ‘Models of Argumentation in Educational Discourse’

This paper is a response to Richard Andrews' ‘Models of argumentation in educational discourse’, particularly to his suggestion that argument studies should turn to ethnography to understand better how argumentation is taught, learned, and deployed. The response notes that Toulmin's model of argument (claim, data, warrant, etc.) and his theory of argumentation have called for such attention since the 1950s; however, the educational reception of the model (whether for instruction, assessment, or research) has largely ignored the sociocultural dimensions of Toulmin's work and treated the model as a generic heuristic. In fact, a great deal of work relevant to a new ethnography of argumentation has already been undertaken in a variety of sociocultural settings. This paper reviews examples of such studies and argues that they point to a pressing need to move beyond analysis of argumentative artifacts (whether texts, films, music, photographs, monuments, or whatever) to analysis of people's embodied, collaborative, and distributed activity in complexly laminated fields of practice.