Capturing Interdisciplinary Dialogic Argumentation among Science Teachers: An Analysis of Epistemic Practices in a Dialogue

Research in the learning sciences has recognized dialogic argumentation as a key approach to enhance learning. Productive features of such dialogues include openness to alternative perspectives, critical examination, and collaborative knowledge construction. Such deliberation is difficult to achieve within the compartmentalized structure of traditional science teaching, which hinders the exploration of different perspectives on a scientific problem. We propose interdisciplinarity as a means to promote deliberativeness in the discourse of science teachers from different disciplinary backgrounds. We introduce a quantitative coding instrument to examine both the dialogic and epistemic aspects of teachers' discourse and to account for deliberation through the integration of different disciplinary epistemic practices.