Being (Un)safe together: Student group dynamics, facework and argumentation

Small group work offers the opportunity for students to engage in many-sided discussions. Students can learn how to argue standpoints and develop argumentative competence (i.e. learning to argue) but may also, by using argumentative structures, learn about and tease apart relevant facets of the topic at hand (i.e. arguing to learn). Although these processes can be beneficial for both arguing to learn as well as learning to argue, their success is predicated on the characteristics of the group enacting them. Discussions happen in a social, interpersonal context. Especially in small group collaborative learning, the social relationships between students should have a stronger and more direct impact on the form and content of their contributions than in more direct, teacher-led instruction. In this chapter, we will seek to specify the relations between cognitive and social aspects of collaborative argumentation and illustrate them with an example from the DIALLS lesson recordings.