Argumentation for Equal Civic Standing: A Culturally Responsive, Safe Third-Space Framework

Argumentation pedagogy in culturally plural classrooms — including the adult and continuing-education settings in which many migrant and refugee learners pursue inclusion — faces two recurrent failure modes: assimilationism, which imposes conformity to host-country reasoning styles and identity at the cost of learners' home-discourse repertoires and epistemic agency; and identity-based relativism, which refuses any shared procedural ground for reasoning. This article specifies a framework that is neither. It assumes no deficit in learners' reasoning: what differs across a culturally plural cohort is not the capacity to reason but prior access to a public sphere organized by liberal-democratic procedural norms. The framework opens a non-indoctrinative path to those norms — democratic competence cultivated indirectly, as the practical mastery of argumentative engagement under explicit rules, rather than directly, as doctrinal civics. It rests on four founding principles — three procedural-philosophical (Hume's mitigated skepticism, Popperian fallibilism, Wittgensteinian contextualism) and one normative (equal civic standing, understood through epistemic justice) — realized as a safe third-space: explicit classroom rules that admit home-discourse repertoires as legitimate input, refuse identity-based assignment of argumentative standing, and protect classroom positions from grading or attribution penalty. Consistent with its own fallibilism, it is offered as a disconfirmable design: its claims are pinned to measurable indicators — equity of participation, the giving and assessing of publicly shareable reasons, reduced self-silencing, and reported belonging — that a multi-site pilot can in principle refute. This is a conceptual and design contribution, not a report of completed results; its operational correlates, worked cases, and assessment instruments are detailed in the online companion (Schwed, 2026b). A practical aim is to convene partners for a future Erasmus+ adult-education Cooperation Partnership to pilot the framework across European sites.