On the Relative Merits of Teaching Textuality, Codifying Textual Behavior, and Detecting Transgressions

Rebecca Moore Howard

Conference on Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism

University of Michigan

25 September 2005

[NB: Online readers can download the PowerPoint for this presentation here.]

In the 1980s, when I began researching issues of authorship related to plagiarism, almost no one else was taking it up as a scholarly topic. Jim Porter and Linda Hutcheon had some interesting theoretical work on plagiarism and intertextuality, and of course literary studies had a long tradition of attending to the plagiarism of canonized dead white guys. But colleagues and reviewers explained to me that student plagiarism was a distasteful topic that should be confined to the realm of practice. It was a necessary issue for practice but an unsuitable topic for scholarship.

Things have changed since then. Lots of people are working on plagiarism and even on student plagiarism, and a body of insightful scholarship is emerging from community inquiry. At the Center for Academic Integrity, Don McCabe and his colleagues have been tracking the incidence of student cheating; Amy Robillard has an article on student authorship coming out soon in College English; Diane Pecorari has conducted fascinating research on graduate students' textual appropriations; Mike Edwards is investigating economic models for student authorship, including constructions of plagiarism; Kelly Ritter has just published an article on the economics of authorship in College Composition and Communication; and Tracy Carrick and I have just published a textbook—a textbook!—on student authorship. And behold, there's even a conference on the topic—and a very fine conference it has been, indeed.

One thing that's now needed in the field is a classificatory way of understanding the various philosophies of textuality that inform this scholarship and the public discourse on the topic, as well. That's my task today.

Epistemological approaches

What I'll offer is my analysis of epistemologies of plagiarism. This analysis is a work in progress, a cornerstone of a book I'm developing, tentatively titled Plagiarism and Privilege in the Academy. Because it's a work in progress, I'm not yet confident of my taxonomies and terminology, and I'll appreciate any suggestions you might have. And because this work in progress is taxonomic, I'll resort to a diagram, and try to explain my way through it. Bear with me, because I'm going to try to do this in PowerPoint, whose use I am largely ignorant of. After today's presentation, I'll be able to rest secure in the confidence that no one will ever try to persuade me to teach technical writing.

Slide 1

Individual remediation or reform

Educational efforts

In one familiar epistemology of plagiarism, the causes of, meanings of, and solutions to plagiarism are all focused on the individual and on individual agency.

Slide 2

For those pursuing this epistemology, solutions to plagiarism may be found in educational efforts.

Slide 3

Most institutions endeavor to accomplish the educational task by publishing, usually in the student handbook, a definition of plagiarism, together with institutional regulations against the practice of plagiarism. Here, for example, is the statement at the Sonoma State University site, chosen because of how typical it is.

Slide 4

In these published policies, some institutions include advice for students about how to cite sources. Such instructional materials may be available elsewhere on the college website, the hardcopy student handbook, or handouts distributed in the writing center. Here, for example, is one page of the Writing Center site at Texas A&M University, written as an aid for student writers:

Slide 5

Another typical effort of the individual epistemology of plagiarism is to offer classroom instruction in writing from sources. All sections of first-year composition or first-year seminars, for example, may devote a class period to teaching students how to cite from sources. Or they may teach the definition of and punishments for plagiarism. The Council of Writing Program Administrators offers suggestions for goals that classroom instruction on writing from sources might pursue:

Slide 6

Efforts at control

In addition to or instead of efforts at education, an individual epistemology may focus on controlling plagiarism and plagiarists.

Slide 7

Policies against plagiarism serve well in this regard: by defining plagiarism and listing dire consequences, institutional plagiarism policies exercise control by discouraging plagiarism. Writers' handbooks usually assist in the campaign for controlling plagiarism. Because I am a handbook author and am presenting on a panel with another handbook author, I'll go to an antiquated version of the Harbrace Handbook to illustrate how handbooks assist in controlling plagiarism:

Slide 8

Whether it is institutional policies or writers' handbooks, the efforts to control plagiarism through education usually take up the task of scaring would-be plagiarists, either through dire warnings or by catching and punishing students caught in flagrante delicto.

Systems remediation or reform

In addition to the individual epistemology of plagiarism, the causes of, meanings of, and solutions to plagiarism may be focused on the social context within which plagiarism occurs.

Slide 9

A social epistemology of plagiarism looks to the setting—the classroom or the larger institution—rather than to the individual for explanations of plagiarism.

Reform efforts

Social epistemology may in turn engender efforts to reform the social system—the classroom or larger institution.

Slide 10

Rewriting plagiarism policy, instituting an honor code, and redefining the term plagiarism are three types of system reform, all aimed at policy issues.

Slide 11

The Center for Academic Integrity, for example, advocates system reform by installing honor codes:

Slide 12

And the Council of Writing Program Administrators advocates rewriting plagiarism policy so that it withdraws misuse of sources from the category of plagiarism—another type of policy-based system reform:

Slide 13

Efforts at control

Yet a social epistemology may not focus on system reform but on issues of control. Both an individual epistemology and a social epistemology may exercise control mechanisms in response to plagiarism.

Slide 14

Just as an individual epistemology of plagiarism may exercise control by issuing dire warnings about the punishment for plagiarism, a social epistemology of plagiarism may exercise control by compelling students to "submit"—and here the dual meaning of that word is significant—to submit their work to a plagiarism-checking service such as Turnitin.com:

Slide 15

So there's where we stand so far. We have—"we" assuming that you're bearing with me in this taxonomic argument—two epistemologies of plagiarism, one focused on the individual, the other on the social context in which plagiarism occurs.

Slide 16

Both epistemologies can produce efforts at control—the individual epistemology, through an effort to strike fear into the hearts of would-be plagiarists; the social epistemology, by making plagiarism-checking a standard part of pedagogy. McGill University in 2003 went so far as to require that all students in all classes submit all their papers to Turnitin.com before they would be graded. (What happened next is a story for another day.)

What can we do with this taxonomy? Most immediately, we can see that the various responses to plagiarism are not simply random variables but instead derive from foundational grounds about the nature of textual activity. One of these epistemologies locates plagiarism within the individual writer; the other views plagiarism in its social context.

Another thing we can do with this taxonomy is to take it to yet another level. And from that level, I find myself able to talk about what we ought and ought not to be "doing about" student plagiarism.

At that next level, I've already talked about the policy reforms that may result from a social epistemology: the institution of honor codes, redefined terminology, rewritten academic integrity statements.

Slide 17

I've also talked about the instruction in conventions that may result from an individual epistemology: the efforts to teach practices of quotation, citation, and documentation:

Slide 18

But the individual epistemology has the possibility of a different kind of education, one aimed not at transmitting technical knowledge of conventions but of fostering critical reading practices of text comprehension and synthesis:

Slide 19

The Council of Writing Program Administrators Best Practices recommendations point to these educational possibilities:

Slide 20

In a similar vein, a social epistemology of plagiarism can attend not just to the reform of institutional policy but to pedagogical methods.

Slide 21

This possibility, too, is advocated in the Council of Writing Program Administrators document, and its pursuit would involve us in faculty developmemt workshops:

Slide 22

Recommendations such as those described by the WPA would reform pedagogy not just by "preventing plagiarism" but by creating a learning environment in which students can produce their own writing and want to. I can't emphasize that enough: as part of if not the focus of our responses to what's called the "plagiarism epidemic," we should be creating a learning environment in which students can produce their own writing and want to.

My scholarship has, for the most part, drawn on both these epistemologies, the individual and the social, but has focused on the approaches to plagiarism that in this taxonomy I have placed on the "outside": the education approach that teaches critical reading practices, and the pedagogical approach that creates classrooms conducive to writing and learning.

Slide 23

Notice that in this taxonomy, the teaching of citation conventions and the reformation of institutional plagiarism policies are in close contact with the more overt efforts at controlling student bodies. These are necessary—absolutely essential—responses to concerns about plagiarism. Students have to know citation conventions, and institutions have to have clear, sensible policies regarding plagiarism. But these are not sufficient responses.

My emphasis will no doubt continue with the outside nodes of teaching critical reading and reforming pedagogy, because I think they are the most difficult, the most neglected, and the most important. Teaching citation conventions is a largely technical enterprise; one either has or has not correctly cited a source. Reforming institutional policy is largely procedural, no matter how contested that procedure may be. But because reforming pedagogy and teaching critical reading are messy, open-ended enterprises, they are often neglected as responses to concerns about plagiarism. Yet it is my belief that if we do well at education and social reform—if we successfully teach critical reading and citation conventions; if we revise our institutional policies so that they don't include misuse of sources in the definition of plagiarism; and if we create pedagogies of mentored engagement in course materials—the need for control mechanisms such as Turnitin.com will shrink to insignificance. And thereby we will save our institutions the stunning amounts of money paid annually to such services. And we will, in addition, cease to create alienating pedagogical structures that assume our students are motivated to cheat.

Works Cited

Carrick, Tracy Hamler, and Rebecca Moore Howard, eds. Authorship in Composition Studies. Boston: Wadsworth, 2006.

Center for Academic Integrity. Kenan Institute for Ethics, Duke University, Durham NC, n.d. 26 Sept. 2005 <http://www.academicintegrity.org/>.

Edwards, Mike. "About that Carnival." Weblog entry. Vitia. 15 Aug. 2005. 19 Sept. 2005 <http://www.vitia.org/wordpress/archives/2005/08/15/about-that-carnival/>.

Edwards, Mike. "How Much Should You Pay for a C+ Paper? The Production, Circulation, and Ownership of Student Writing." Conference on College Composition and Communication. San Francisco, CA. 16-19 Mar. 2005. 19 Sept. 2005 <http://www.vitia.org/sharingwriting/>.

Lesko, John P. "Dr. Lesko's SVSU Homepage: Bio and Blogspace." 2004-2005. 24 Sept. 2005 <http://www.svsu.edu/~jplesko/bio.htm>.

Pecorari, Diane. "Good and Original: Plagiarism and Patchwriting in Academic Second-Language Writing." Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003): 317-345.

Ritter, Kelly. "The Economics of Authorship: Online Paper Mills, Student Writers, and First-Year Composition." College Composition and Communication 56:4 (June 2005): 601-631.

Robillard, Amy E. "Young Scholars Affecting Composition: A Challenge to Disciplinary Citation Practices." College English 68.3 (2006).

Turnitin.com. Home page. iParadigms, 2004. 6 Oct. 2004 <http://www.turnitin.com/static/home.html?session-id=0f198b7809d6571db31e43e1cb257bf4>.