Role-play Becoming Real Becoming Necessary

           I’ve written about argumentation in a previousblog-post but based on the reading Learning Argument Practices Through Online Role-Play: Towards a Rhetoric of Significance and Transformation by Richard Beach and Candance Doerr-Stevens I’ve felt compelled to write on the subject again. The basic premise of the article was to examine how students are learning to argue based on their interactions in virtual spaces. These virtual spaces include traditional online news media websites and social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Not only are they exposed to local, state, national, and international events and issues but they are able to see the immediate responses from the experiences these events/issues directly. Never in the whole of history has this been possible. Students today with access to the internet are able to learn and patriate in the conversation on just about any event or issue happening in the world today.

            In the not so distant past, student who are asked in classes to write an argumentative essay or speech have had to do so on topics that are seemingly meaningless. Beach and Doerr don’t go into specific topics here but conclude by saying these standard papers/ presentations have been “ little more than “knowledge telling”(Bereiter&Scardamali, 1984)” I can attest to this by my own high school experiences with research being shaky at best and the products being a manipulation of the information I found. Bereiter&Scardamli wrote in the mid 1980’s and I was experiencing the same thing in the mid 2000’s. There was little change in that 30 years for high school research. Now, students I’ve observed and read about are able to engage with research in a meaningful and intellectual and impactful way.

            Students who use the internet need to converse with others using “netiquette” a.k.a. being coherent and polite. I’ve heard it more than once that Facebook is the place where good conversation goes to die. It is similarly true for Tumblr and YouTube. Don’t read the comments gets said many content creators on every corner of the web. Yet, the comment section is where the dialogue his happening. Good, thoughtful, and productive conversation can happen. Beach and Doerr agree with Randi Dickson. They and many other educators say that debate and argumentation needs to be a space for constructive learning for all involved. Beach and Doerr go a step farther and say “students also [need] to respect their adversaries as potential sources for useful ideas and solutions.” (Beach, 2009)

            Student now are able to engage with meaningful events in their lives and dive in deeply. They can spark and renew conversations on multimedia formats. With proper instruction and organization they can then take this research and formulate persuasive essays based on their “role-play” i.e. engagement in these real and virtual spaces. This practice within the classroom setting is preparing student for real world debate and full partition in our democracies. These are real world skills than are meaningful and necessary. They are empowering. They are formative and substantive. Teachers need to make the terms of engagement and in virtual space needs to be the same as if it were face-to-face. Make your spaces positive and constructive. Make them meaningful.