Does Classroom Deliberation Promote Gender Equity? Understanding Pedagogical Affordances of Peer Dialogue
摘要
Collaborative peer argumentation has been shown to be beneficial at both conceptual and skills levels. Deliberative argumentation among peers—argumentation that emerges in a problem-solving context where the communicative goal is to understand and find the best possible solution to a controversial issue—is considered a key pedagogical practice in contemporary democracies. However, affordances of peer deliberation about gender equity are still underexplored. On the one hand, we still do not know how power unfolds within deliberative discussions. How women and gender minorities benefit from these discussions, and whether deliberations change the way students think about gender issues, are open questions. On the other hand, whether peer deliberation can foster educational spaces that are less polarized in terms of gender differences is another open question. The aim of this chapter is to explore these questions through two case analyses of secondary students (16 years old) who were learning climate-change science and citizenship education through a deliberative pedagogy. The interventions lasted between 4 and 6 weeks, and we analyzed inter-views and classroom discussions that were audio recorded. The results show how deliberative discussions change the organization of power according to gender, in terms of both empowering speakers and also their political positions in gender controversies. We discuss the results considering socio-cultural and dialogical theory.