by Janel Atlas

Much of the current scholarship published in the Writing Center Journal, Praxis, and College Composition and Communication reveals that minimalist tutoring is still very much the dominant philosophy in writing centers. While I agree that writing center sessions should keep student writers in control of the focus and direction of appointments, I still maintain that offering rhetorical templates and formulas can empower writers rather than stifle them.

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Those two sentences do not make for spell-binding prose, but they do indicate clearly the space I’m carving out to share my ideas. The formula I used is based on the ur-formula put forward by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing, first published in 2006 and now in its 3^rd edition (W.W. Norton, 2015). My opening two lines of this paper employ the ‘they say/I say’ construction Graff and Birkenstein encourage academic writers to use.

In The Debatifier’s previous post we examined the ways in which debatable issues are like and unlike framing moves and essential questions, and we identified the five key criteria for the effective formulation of debatable issues:

• Openness
• Balance
• Focus
• Authenticity
• Intellectual Interest

In this post we will explore how debatable issues organize the structure and influence the full trajectory of a unit in an argument-centered classroom.

Not to pre-empt the inquiry, but the sum of it really is this: all the elements in a unit should be connectable to the debatable issue(s) in argument-centered instruction. A line should be traceable from the debatable issue(s) out to all of the activities, assignments, projects, and assessments in a unit. Debatable issues give units their thematic coherence. They give context for tasks and exercises conducted a unit, and they allow for the gradual building of understanding in a unit to then have full expression in culminating performance task assessments.

‘Framing the debate’ is a phrase that doesn’t mean what at first you would think it means. Instead of denoting the way that a topic for argument is defined, it has actually absorbed some of the nefarious overtones of law and order ‘framing’ (i.e., ‘setting up,’ ‘deceptively imputing guilt’). Cognitive linguist George Lakoff, in his highly influential 2004 book Don’t Think of an Elephant!, and books in its wake such as Jeffrey Feldman’s Framing the Debate, have shifted the way the phrase is understood to something like ‘commanding the language of the debate so as to slant it in your favor.’ So, for example, when conservatives are able to put the term ‘tax relief’ in common circulation, they have a significant edge in the debate over levels of taxation and governmental services, since ‘relief’ already embeds the implication of ‘comforting’ and ‘healthy’ and countering an extreme.

by Hans Villarica, Education Writer

American educators agreed last year that argumentative reasoning should be taught in schools when those in most states adopted the new Common Core State Standards a state-led effort to establish educational benchmarks to prepare kindergarten through 12th grade students for college and career. Reaching a similar consensus on how to teach the art of arguing, however, hasn’t been as easy. But a new study published in the journal Psychological Science could offer a solution in the form of dialogue.

by Gerald Graff

Since the Common Core State Standards are long and diffuse, not all readers notice the special emphasis they place on argument, far more than did any previous standards.  Also easy to overlook is that the CCSS highlight the type of argument in which students engage with opposing views, evaluating “the strength and weaknesses of multiple perspectives” and anticipating “counterclaims in opposition to their own assertions.”