Welcome to the website of ARGUE Project funded by the Teaching Development and Enhancement Programme of the Division of Social Sciences at the University of Oxford. The focus of the project is ‘argumentation’ broadly defined as the justification of claims with evidence and reasons. Many academic disciplines address societal challenges (e.g. reducing poverty) that require an understanding of arguments (e.g. evidence for climate change) and effective engagement in argumentation (e.g. differentiating the quality of evidence). The project has thus produced a set of strategies and resources to provide examples to instructors who are interested in incorporating argumentation into their teaching. The website consists of research evidence-based strategies to teaching and learning argumentation in higher education. The project team is based in the Department of Education and they are educational researchers who have infused evidence from their research into their own teaching practice. The researchers provide examples of strategies to support written and verbal argumentation through a range of resources including videos and written tasks. The particular context of the researchers’ own teaching is the training of pre-service (Post-Graduate Certificate in Education) and in-service (Master’s in Learning and Teaching) teacher education programmes offered by the Department of Education.
The website includes strategies developed by Professor Sibel Erduran, Professor Gabriel Stylianides and Dr Liam Guilfoyle from the Department of Education to infuse argumentation in their teaching. The strategies are organised around the following three broad questions:
- What is the meaning of argumentation in the context of a particular discipline?
- How do we introduce students to the meaning of argumentation? What can be some discipline-specific considerations in doing so?
- How do we apply the meaning of argumentation in relevant contexts?
Click on the following photographs to see example strategies.
