This chapter surveys and critiques the three major viewpoints on the ethics of communication, which I label Civility, Victory, and Open-mindedness. For Civility, activism must be governed by a set of rules for respectful engagement. For Victory, the ends justify the means, and for the sake of one’s political goals, one may need to mislead audiences, dismiss opponents, and use ad hominem attacks. For Open-mindedness, it is violent and immoral to impose one’s views on others. I argue that all three perspectives have serious shortcomings, but that each voice expresses a valuable concern. People want their advocacy to be moral, effective, and nonviolent, but often feel like it is impossible to have all three.

This chapter examines the research associated with professional development settings for science and engineering practices and self-regulated learning. Since professional development tends to be developmental, the research reviews are separated into preservice preparation and inservice development. Each section of the chapter follows with a summary of recommendations derived from the research for preservice teacher instruction and for inservice teacher professional development experiences. Examples of elementary teacher professional development for teaching data practices in the topic of earth sciences and secondary teacher professional development for teaching argumentation in science using SRL are described.

Chapter 5 explores transitivity systems and structures. It concentrates on the evidence used to motivate descriptions of paradigmatic relations. At stake here is the weight given to evidence of different kinds, including arguing from above, around and below. This chapter also foregrounds the cline of delicacy with respect to both system and structure, exploring what happens when general transitivity classes are explored in greater detail and issues that arise with respect to how much subclassification should be reflected in function structure labelling.

Conceptualising music education not only as ‘music-making’ but as ‘musical meaning-making‘, Valerie Krupp ’s learning episode provides a fascinating example of developing learner musical literacy skills – involving intra- and interpersonal negotiation and reflection and drawing on subject-specific knowledge, skills and processes. She argues that for learners to engage meaningfully in music analysis, recensions, aesthetic arguments and so on, they need to practise and use the language of musical genres and musical inquiry alongside language for critical and aesthetic evaluation. This, she proposes, promotes learner agency, encompassing musical literacies, competences and critical cultural consciousness. Situating the learning episode as praxial, student-relevant and real-world, it concerns the posting of a sea shanty, ‘The Wellerman’, on TikTok. Against all odds, the song ‘went viral‘, leading to ‘in the moment‘ global interest in sea shanties. Learners investigate why such a musical phenomenon took place. This opens up critical inquiry into the socio-cultural context of the shanty genre – classifying, analysing and critiquing musical and social media and analysing user comments. This example could be transferred to exploring other musical genres and interpretations.

This chapter explores the use of clichés as argumentative strategies in online reception of political news items. It conceptualises clichés as strategies that draw on conventionalised inferable premises that warrant conclusion and link the argument with a claim, also known as topoi. Drawing on online commentaries in response to the same item of Brexit news across The Guardian, the Daily Mail and BBC News, the chapter explains how clichés as topoi operate as strategies to legitimise a position and to other members of a perceived out-group thereby allowing participatory media users to construe ideational and interpersonal meanings in the argumentation process.

Trust is a fundamental constituent of financial market interactions. As well-known cases of corporate failures in past and recent history have illustrated, betraying the trust that investors and other stakeholders put in corporate leaders can bring drastic consequences for the organisation concerned as well as for markets and society at large. A low level of trust in the market makes it more difficult also for sound and ethical business projects to be funded and supported. Research in accounting has highlighted the link between poor/unethical business practices and unsound/deceitful corporate communications, which leads to two interesting implications for business communication researchers and practitioners: (1) discourse analysis and evaluation can become a source for detecting – and possibly avoiding – unreliable business endeavours; (2) improving financial communication skills can enhance the quality of strategic thinking and decision-making as well as help corporate managers to build long-term trust while persuading sceptical stakeholders to support a business initiative. This chapter takes a rhetorical argumentation perspective advocating the crucial role of argumentation skills.

This introduction has three goals: to locate this book’s arguments in contemporary scholarship on Parmenides, to outline its methodology and structure, and to establish the stakes of the project as a whole. The first considers Parmenides’ invention of extended deductive argumentation and the practice of demonstration – the central topic of this book – as a relic of the ‘Greek Miracle’ paradigm; it also addresses discussions of Parmenides’ use of poetry and his relationship to Homer. The second addresses distinctions between actors’ and observers’ categories and between reasoning and discourse, and explores the Foucauldian discourse analysis that anchors the book’s treatment of the relationship between Parmenides and Homer. The third requires setting out what this book does not intend to do in order to specify its main contribution: providing an account of how Parmenides’ use of the image of the hodos helps him invent extended deductive argumentation and the practice of demonstration. The Introduction sketches out the three axes of the book’s argument: an exploration of the physical reality of archaic and classical Greek roads, a discussion of the semantics of the word hodos, and an articulation of the relationship between Parmenides’ and Homer’s poems.

Mainstream pro-war news media reporting of the 2003 Iraq War was highly sanitized in a way that reduced war coverage to a cinematic spectacle. The picture that was painted by the coalition mainstream media reporters was of a war free of images of suffering, destruction, dissent, and diplomacy, but full of sophisticated US weaponry, chivalrous “heroism” and militarist “humanitarianism.” The US control of news media framing (through censorship and embedding systems) shielded viewers from the “realities” of the battlefield through recourse to maneuvering “avoidance” strategies, such as the “dehistorization,” “depersonalization,” and “decontextualization” of the unfolding conflict. By muting dissenting voices, the pro-war coalition media frames manufactured an “interpretive dominance” that was inextricably structured in hegemony and social control.

This chapter reviews research that examines the fundamental cognitive and social processes whereby people learn to read and write. The chapter discusses three types of literate knowledge. First, literacy can be general, such as the ability to decode words or engage in drafting and revision. Second, literacy can be task-specific: learning to read a novel and learning to read a recipe require different declarative and procedural knowledge. Third, literacy can be community-specific, in which members of a community approach a given text using different cognitive and interpretive frameworks. Learning how to read and write requires many distinct cognitive components, from decoding letters to composing and interpreting texts. Literacy also requires the ability to integrate these skills within communities of practice, and these findings are aligned with sociocultural perspectives on learning in all subjects.

This chapter reviews collaborative argumentation, where a community of learners works together to advance the collective state of knowledge through debate, engagement, and dialogue. Engagement in collaborative argumentation can help students learn to think critically and independently about important issues and contested values. Students must externalize their ideas and metacognitively reflect on their developing understandings. This chapter summarizes the history of argumentation theory; how arguing can contribute to learning through making knowledge explicit, conceptual change, collaboration, and reasoning skills; how argumentation skill develops in childhood; and how argumentation varies in different cultural and social contexts. The chapter concludes by describing a variety of tools that scaffold effective argumentation, including through computer-mediated communication forums and argumentation maps.

Action ascription is an emergent process of mutual displays of understanding. Usually, the kind of action that is ascribed to a prior turn by a next action remains implicit. Sometimes, however, actions are overtly ascribed, for example, when speakers expose the use of strategies. This happens particularly in conflictual interaction, such as public debates or mediation talks. In these interactional settings, one of the speakers’ goals is to discredit their opponents in front of other participants or an overhearing audience. This chapter investigates different types of overt strategy ascriptions in a public mediation: exposing the opponent’s use of rhetorical devices, exposing the opponent’s use of false premises, and exposing that an opponent is telling only a half-truth. This chapter shows how speakers use ascriptions of acting strategically as accusations to disclose their opponents’ intentions and ‘truths’ that the opponents allegedly conceal and that are detrimental to their position.