Schenectady Synecdoche

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June 14, 2006

Respecting student writing

Recently a colleague approached me for advice about copyright and publishers' permissions. (Although my expertise is in authorship rather than IP, I do pay attention to copyright, so I do get questions from time to time. Plus I slept at a Holiday Inn last night.) Her quandary has been on my mind ever since.

Under current copyright law, students have special privileges. The 500-word quotation limit does not apply to them; they have the right to quote more extensively—for educational purposes. (I'm not talking here about local plagiarism restrictions, which typically require attribution of the source, but about copyright, which limits the length of permissible quotation, regardless of citation and documentation.) Similarly, students are allowed to appropriate images created by others.

And then the fun begins. What happens when a college collects and publishes exemplary student writing? As I understand it, it's still okay. Still for educational purposes.

But what happens when the college begins making money from that collection of student writing? What happens, for example, when the exemplary student writing is included in—or itself becomes—the "reader" used in composition classes, with composition students purchasing copies?

Ah. No longer educational purposes. Now the college has to backtrack and find out where all those quotations and images came from—and as every teacher knows, practically no student provides a completely accurate attribution trail. So somebody has to do the excruciating work of identifying the rights-holders of all those quotations and images. And then somebody has to do the even more excruciating work of contacting all those rights-holders for permission to reprint. And then somebody has to pay for all those rights.

One moral to this story is to sign contracts with publishers that require them to get all those permissions. But that leaves the question of backtracking through all those student papers to figure out who the rights-holders are.

And that leads to what is for me an even bigger moral of the story: Take your students' writing seriously. Require that they fully document their sources. Most of us writing teachers, I think, tend to worry most about the logical development of ideas, the telling of a compelling story. And most of us, I'm afraid, regard editing and documenting as mechanical work that can be postponed till a later date. Yet if we actually are taking our students' writing seriously, if we actually are respecting and appreciating those logical, well-developed, compelling stories, then we should be expecting those writers to be fully documenting their sources, so that later, when their essays win prizes and are being considered for publication in composition readers, they won't be cut because their sources can't be identified and contacted.

And this isn't a very unusual scenario. The reason I've been thinking about my colleague's quandary is that it resonates with my own. My handbook is going to have model student essays in it, and as I've combed through prospects—essays that I thought were terrific and that I fully expected to use in the book—there are several that I've had to eliminate because of source-attribution problems. If my colleagues and I had regarded our students' writing as potentially fit for an audience larger than one and if we had really taught them how to document sources, those students' work would be getting published soon. As it is, all they got was a grade.

Posted by senioritis at June 14, 2006 08:25 AM

Comments

Posted by: The Old Bag at June 14, 2006 04:07 PM

Posted by: joanna at June 17, 2006 02:47 PM