Abstract
The aim of this thesis is to study the conditions under which teaching to argue on Socio Scientific Issues (SSI) with computer-mediated debates can foster affective and cognitive commitment towards new learning path for teenagers with behavior disorders. In order to identify these conditions, I chose a hybrid approach combining argumentation education and psychoanalysis for educational situations. Thereby, we design educational proposition centered on practicing computer-mediated debates. Indeed, argumentation is at the same time an educational goal to develop citizenship and an educational mean to acquire knowledge. How to develop those skills with teenagers with behavior disorders? What benefits these students can obtain from learning to argue? In order to provide some answers, we undertook a two year-long experiment in a specialized class composed of eight students and two to three professionals of specialized education. Teaching sequences we implemented in the classroom are made of different phases: preparing a text with students to study the complexity of an SSI which will be debated; debating on the digital platform; individual interviews aiming to foster reflexive processes. Thus, different types of data are collected: my written observations about the sessions, students' argumentative productions, videos of every session and recordings of interviews. Our analysis reveals some aspects of the educational intervention considered efficient on a cognitive level and on an affective one which allows us to consider this argumentative experience as transitional. In other words, students learn not only knowledge on which they debate, but also skills to argue about that knowledge. Above and beyond this, it helps them to explore new relations to knowledge and to others so as to redefine their own relations to the environment, on a psychological level.