The Socio-Cognitive-Affective Conflict at the Heart of Learning Processes: A Model Based on 4E Cognition to Renew the Analysis of Educational Dialogues

The two successive social, then affective turns renewed education research and practice, claiming for better taking into account these aspects of leaning processes. In particular, interdisciplinary literature pinpoints that dialogic approaches based on socio-cognitive conflict and argumentation would benefit from viewing learning as a process as much social and affective as cognitive. Still, scarce empirical studies truly integrate these three dimensions of learning, possibly due to a lack of theoretical and methodological framework. Indeed, research on the socio-cognitive conflict evolved in order to encompass non-developmental approaches and to account for socio-affective aspects. But there was no concept update on the theoretical plane allowing for a clear understanding of the role of socio-affective dimensions in the studied processes. In such a context, the ghost of the Cartesian dualism opposing reason to emotion and the mind to the matter still prevails in the analysis of educational dialogues. To overcome such dualism, this paper presents a model to shift from the socio-cognitive to the socio-cognitive-affective conflict, on the basis of the recent 4E approaches to cognition. The third section draws the methodological implications of this model by highlighting three fundamental analytical principles and apply them to an excerpt of recorded authentic dialogue.