Justification

Our Project’s working hypothesis is that argumentative competence is basic in the teaching and learning process of any subject, discipline, activity as well as in any career, and it can only be properly developed by means of all subjects teachers’ participation. In other words, its full development becomes a transversal goal at all levels of all educational systems, emphasizing the one belonging to the National Preparatory.


The problem we are facing is that even though the study of any given subject or career, but above all, the actual praxis of a profession, or simply in our social and personal life requires from us the factual possession of the argumentative competence itself, our students show an evident lack of such required development. This fact is not only well visible in those exams given to them, but above all in those written argumentative assignments or papers required in their study subjects, also visible in those argumentative dialogues they have in class.

To understand this, we have to go through one of the factors, which explains such shortcomings. The development and improvement of the so called Argumentative Competence is not considered an explicitly required neither nor a well established goal nor educational objective in the majority of the Mexican curricula; however some exceptions are to be found in subjects such as Logic and Spanish language in the case of the ENP, or as in the CCH (Science and Humanities College by its Spanish acronym) case where The Reading and Composition Course-Shop and the Philosophy I classes lead the pack.

Additional to the previous, we must face the fact that there is almost no learning strategies, teaching activities or didactic materials specially designed in order to achieve the development of the argumentative abilities and attitudes required to perform such tasks in given situations whether theoretical, practical, scholarly bound and or in plain everyday situations.

The above-mentioned problem may be established by means of using the following question: how can we improve the students´ argumentative competence?

Our working hypothesis or our solution proposal for the already mentioned problem is that there is only one way to achieve an appropriate development of the Sr. High School students argumentative competence. That is, if all teachers create, design, develop, or at least use strategies, activities and didactic materials, which are really useful to teach students how to argue in those subjects or disciplines they teach. Now, the latter will require the teachers to work on their own argumentative education, and updating themselves by means of educational research, collegiate work and interdisciplinary work.